← The Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast
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- [00:01]
Zoetis Representative
You show up for pets every day. It's because care is your calling and it's ours too. We know it's what drives you to make a difference in the health and well being of every pet. That's because at Zoetis, hundreds of veterinarians are part of our team too, working with you to provide science backed medicines, technology and practical support to help elevate your standard of care. Learn more@careisyourcalling.com foreign.
- [00:39]
Dr. Andrew Rick
To the cone of Shame veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andrew Rick. Guys, I got a wild episode today. A cry for help from your pathology friends. This is a really interesting conversation with Dr. Eric Fish. He's a clinical pathologist. He, he writes a lot about pathology, about science or medicine and about AI and he's been dark recently. He's been, he's been, he's been sharing some views of the veterinary pathology profession that are that, dare I say pessimistic. It, it's, it looks like a dark time for our pathology friends and I, I just kept looking at it and going, is that what it's like to be a clinical pathologist in vet medicine? Really? It's a fascinating conversation. Today we talk through like, what are the economic drivers affecting pathologists and the pathology work in our profession? How is veterinary pathology changing? What are the pay structures for pathologists today? And if you're just interested in understanding how this piece of our profession works, this is a fascinating episode. It's really interesting. And also there's a lot of the components that Eric talks about that I can kind of extrapolate into general practice as well. Pathology is interesting because it's similar to radiology and that it can be digitized and has been digitized in a lot of ways. And also the experience the pathologists have and the radiologists have, they're pretty different. And we get into why that is. So anyway, guys, this is a really interesting episode. I have not had a conversation like this that I can remember. I hope you guys will enjoy it. Let's get into it.
- [02:17]
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- [02:34]
Dr. Eric Fish
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- [02:43]
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- [02:48]
Dr. Eric Fish
Your show, we're glad you're here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
- [03:04]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Welcome to the podcast. Dr. Eric Fish. How are you, my friend?
- [03:08]
Dr. Eric Fish
Great, thank you. Very excited to be here. It's kind of like when you listen to the radio and someone says, longtime listener, first time caller.
- [03:15]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Excellent. Well, well, thanks. Thanks a lot for making time for this. For those who don't know you, you are a veterinary clinical pathologist and a laboratory director at a large private referral center. You've done a ton of things in your career. You've been academia, you've been in industry. You have kind of worked all over as a clinical pathologist. That's kind of where you come from. You write on substack and that's actually where I became sort of aware of you. It's called All Great and Small. And you write about a lot of different things. Things, yeah, you write about a lot of different things, just generally in veterinary medicine and science in general. You write a lot about pathology and the profession of veterinary pathology. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today. I know that I'm talking to you kind of not as a representative of any company, anything like that. You know, this is just 100% you and me, just you and me talking. So anyway, yeah, so let's, let's kind of get into this. I want to sort of give a high level idea of kind of what I found most interesting. So you've been writing a lot recently. And the thing that I've been sort of most surprised by, my feeling is that you are a bit pessimistic about the future of the career path of veterinary pathologists. And so you put a number of things out about how pathology as a vocation is changing and specifically sort of how it's changing with AI and things like that. And I got to Eric, I was really blown away as I'm sort of reading through your sort of descriptions of how technology is being used and how it is changing what has traditionally been done by pathology and pathologists. And you kind of painted sort of a dark picture here. Let me hand this over to you. Can you talk to me at a high level about sort of the state of clinical pathology as a practitioner?
- [05:04]
Dr. Eric Fish
Sure, yeah. So I think what you're referring to is a month or two ago I wrote something called A Cry for Help and it was based on in our public, our specialties journal, Veterinary Clinical Pathology. There was a large survey done of European clinical pathologists. So not directly translatable to the us But a lot of themes seem very similar and in very high levels. There was very high levels of burnout, dissatisfaction, there were a lot of complaints about pay. And when you dig down into the details, a lot of clinical pathologists, particularly in Europe, but also frankly in North America, they're starting to make less than even new grad general practitioners. And you know, gps work very hard, they generate a lot of revenue, so that's nothing against them. But there's a huge amount of opportunity cost. Spending four to six years in advanced training and then you're making less than someone who got their DBM six months ago. So it's kind of crazy. And there's a number of reasons for this. It's not one, it's very multifactorial. Part of it is clearly a story about consolidation, particularly in the North. In North America there's a handful of big labs that are probably 85, 90% of the market. And then there's a few boutique labs, a few people work in universities. But the main point of action is the private lab sector. So anytime there's consolidation, they have more power to set wages and policies, things like that. Part of it's definitely a story about technology. Some of that is the transition to digital, which I was a part of. I was involved with some companies that did digital cytology. That has had a lot of positive impacts, but there have also been some growing pains and disruption to the industry. So I think that's part of it. And AI is starting to creep in. I don't think it's at the point yet where that is the main reason for some of the things we're seeing. But it's on the horizon and there's at least a couple companies out there that are starting to market point of care analyzers for cytology, using AI to interpret them really without a person in the loop. And those are starting to get traction and I think that as that grows and they add more capabilities, it is gonna start to eat into the lab business and likewise the employment of pathologists.
- [07:03]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Talk to me a little bit about how the day to day work that you do as a pathologist has changed. And so when did you become boarded?
- [07:13]
Dr. Eric Fish
I did my residency from 2013 to 2016, so got boarded in 2016. I did stay on and do a PhD. So a lot of path residencies are actually combined with graduate training, but particularly PhDs. So I finished that in 2019, but I got board certified by the ACBP in 2016.
- [07:28]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Okay, but you were actually working towards being boarded as a pathologist in like 2013, just in your career. So you're 13 over the last 13 years. Eric, tell what has changed for you in terms of doing this work when you started your training? How different is it now from the type of work that you were either doing or anticipated doing when you started your training?
- [07:48]
Dr. Eric Fish
Sure. So there's a couple different dimensions to that. You know, starting training in a university setting. I was at Auburn and then I stayed on for faculty there. It's a much more diverse role. When you're in a university, part of what you're doing is reading cytology and hematology slides, but you're also teaching. You may be doing research, you may be consulting with the technologists who are running the chemistry panels, things like that. You may be having conversations with clinicians for consults on weird test results, Whereas in the labs, your job is pretty much 97% just reading out cytology slides, almost like a machine. And that was one of the complaints they called out in that European Wellness survey, is that they did not feel like they're utilizing their breadth of training and experience. So that's partly a sector thing versus new technology. The biggest impact I've seen, really since starting, setting aside AI, is the digitization. So that has pushed more and more cytology to the point of care. Instead of mailing things into a big lab network, you may be having a scanner in your hospital that beams it up to a contract group of pathologists in the cloud, and that can allow faster turnaround times. But one of the things is not all the scanners can get anywhere close to 100x resolution. So there are some optical limitations. So unlike digitization for radiologists, where the transition was pretty smooth and there weren't really any handicaps from the technology in cytology, there are some things you just can't see on digital. So that has been a little bit of a rocky transition. I would say another big change has been, frankly, the economics and the price we're starting to see. You know, even when I take my own pets in and they recommend cytology, it can be 250, $300 to the end client. And so some of the things that happen with cytology is it's best used as a quick screening tool. So is it this or is it that? But when it takes 7 days, 10 days to get your result back and it costs as much or more than a biopsy. You're really starting to hurt the value of that rapid screening test. So I think some of the volume issues and pay issues we're seeing with clinical pathology are really due to those macroeconomic changes. So it's like the cost has gone way up and it has been harder and harder to get some of those things in the turnaround time where they're most useful. So I think some people are just opting out of sending cytology. So even before you get to the AI piece, really.
- [09:56]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Okay, so there's a lot of things here to sort of unpack.
- [09:59]
Dr. Eric Fish
Sure.
- [10:00]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Talk to me a little bit more about the transition of pathology towards this focus on cytology slides. And so this is kind of something that you wrote a bit about of 97% of the work now is just looking at cytology slides. I still think of, you know, histopath and, you know, biopsies and things like that, but it sounds like that has sort of changed. Talk to me a little bit about that. My impression is just sort of, from, from reading through some of the patient papers, there's some frustration around the idea that basically we just, we're the readers of slides now. Talk to me. Unpack that for me.
- [10:34]
Dr. Eric Fish
Yeah, absolutely. In a perfect world, clinical pathologists are supposed to be experts in laboratory medicine. So we're supposed to know how each one of the parameters on a chem panel works when they go wrong, what's causing the error. Talking about interpretation, a lot of that has sort of, in an almost turf war way, been absorbed by other specialties. So internal medicine is often the go to and many of these lab companies actually hire internists to be doing some of the consultations that I think in a previous era would have been handled by clinical pathologists. So there's sort of some scope creep and turf creep between those there. And I think that's the major part for like why we're not doing a lot of that consultation on the lab diagnostics. And that's unfortunate because it's like a third of the training and the content that we go through. It's a third of our boards and you just never use a. Again once you finish residency. For most people who leave academia, why
- [11:22]
Dr. Andrew Rick
is that, like, so. Yeah, why, why? I mean, if, if clinical pathologists are trained for it and there's, you know, there's people around to do the work, like, why, why has that. Why have they been kind of moved out of that role?
- [11:33]
Dr. Eric Fish
Yeah, I think there's just a perception that there's not the value add, which is unfortunate because I think there's a huge amount of value add. I think clinicians are like, well, I can interpret my own lab work and internists are there for the kind of, the higher level consult consultations. And it just, it's, it's actually pretty similar to cytology. A lot of people have the perception, well, I can do cytology in my clinic for $10. Why am I mailing it to a lab for this huge price that the client doesn't want to pay? With histopathology and anatomic pathologists, no one has a microtome, no one remembers histology. It's all kind of a nightmare from vet school. So you're like, of course you have to send it to a specialist.
- [12:04]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Right.
- [12:05]
Dr. Eric Fish
The norms and the mores for radiology have shifted very heavily towards, you should probably have a radiologist sign off on this. It's obviously not available everywhere and sometimes clients don't consent, but the norm has really shifted there. Whereas I think clinical pathologists are viewed right now as a nice to have and I think we're sliding towards maybe a don't even need to have in the future, whereas they might have been a must have in the past.
- [12:27]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Why do you think people perceive radiology so differently? Like, why is it those are the same thing of, you know, in both of these cases it's kind of like, well, we've got some information and I'm making a call based on this. You know, having someone who can, who can verify or validate there seems to be value there. Like, why don't you perceive the. Why is radiology going in a different direction in people's minds?
- [12:50]
Dr. Eric Fish
Yeah, I'm not really sure about that. I think their journey from the traditional dipping films and chemical vats to digitization has played out a little differently than pathology for a variety of granular, detailed reasons. I think part of it is there might be more of a shorter loop on feedback. So you take an X ray of something and it's either surgical or there's nodules and pretty soon you're often going to get that feedback back. If you thought it was a GDV and it wasn't, you're going to know if you missed a gdv. You're going to know if you stick a needle in something and it never gets biopsied or never gets further follow up. Well, who's to say you're wrong? You're like, well, I thought it was a mast cell Tumor, you take it off. The client doesn't consent to histopath. You're like, well, I guess I was right.
- [13:29]
Dr. Andrew Rick
That's right.
- [13:29]
Dr. Eric Fish
So there's just. That would be. My guess is that there's not as much of a tight correlation. Like, you know, radiology plays really nicely with surgery. So a lot of those things, you're going to go to surgery and you saw it or you didn't, and then you're going to refine your own mental mod. When I saw this in a patient, it was that. And then it was confirmed when I took it to surgery or referred it for surgery. So that would be my guess. I don't know. I do think, partly for cost reasons, a lot of people don't consent to histopathology. So a lot of times whoever looked at the cyto is the last word. And if that was someone who looked in House, they think that they were right.
- [14:01]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah.
- [14:01]
Dr. Eric Fish
Yeah.
- [14:02]
Dr. Andrew Rick
It's like, let's just call. Let's call it right, and no one will ever come along behind us and correct us. So we're taking the win. Okay. When you look into the future, where do you see this going? Do you think that there's a possibility that, you know, like, maybe. Maybe shortened turnaround time on pathology is going to kind of thrust it back into. Into a more, you know, favorable light in terms of, you know, what we. What we. How we use it in the clinics, or do you think that AI is going to further kind of push. Push pathology down the list? Well, you. You've kind of.
- [14:34]
Zoetis Representative
You've.
- [14:34]
Dr. Andrew Rick
I've seen you sort of talk both ways. I mean, I think you clearly really enjoy being a pathologist. And also you seem to have some. Some concerns where. Where do you really think this goes?
- [14:44]
Dr. Eric Fish
Yeah, so I'll. A couple years ago, I did a talk on AI and medical imaging, and it was focused on pathology, but also talked a little about radiology. And I had a slide in there that said I am ambivalent about artificial intelligence. And I think a lot of people, when they hear the word ambivalent, think someone means, like, disinterested or they don't care. When really, if you break it down, ambi is both. And valent is a strong opinion. So it means you have conflicting and equally strong opinions. And I have a lot of positive and negative thoughts about AI. You know, if you're a fan of the X Files, one of the things Mulder used to say is, I want to believe. I want to believe that there's a future where AI makes us more efficient where it helps patients by getting better catching things that you wouldn't have seen on the X ray. It makes us enjoy our jobs more because it gets rid of some of the scut work like just kind of doing mindless counting or mitotic counts, things like that, and really helps us focus on the thought work and providing care for patients. What I am seeing over the last few years is not a lot of data to support this. I'm seeing what little data emerges that's independent. The performance is often a little lackluster in my opinion. And the model we're moving towards is not augmentation, it's replacement. So we're pitching boxes that you can buy from for $5,000 or you get it roped into your lab contract and for a low consumable cost, you can get a pathology read. And that is going to, I think be very attractive to a lot of practices in this environment where a lot of clients are very concerned about costs, people are concerned about turnaround time. So I don't think that future is inevitable, but I'm worried that's the model a lot of the big stakeholders are looking for. And frankly it's because they want to reduce their own costs. Pathologists are a pretty big cost center for a lot of these major labs. So you don't want to infer negative motivations on the part of some of these people. But I do worry that a big part of it is about cost savings more than medical quality or efficiency per se.
- [16:39]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah, there's the thing in my mind is, you know, you're not going to lose your job to AI. You'll lose your job to someone who's using AI. And it's like, I imagine, you know,
- [16:45]
Dr. Eric Fish
people say that all the time and it's just become such a, it's kind of annoying.
- [16:51]
Dr. Andrew Rick
I think it's, I think it's super annoying. It's, it means nothing. Like there's no real wisdom there. And people say it all the time.
- [16:57]
Dr. Eric Fish
No. And it's really just kind of a frankly self serving kind of aphorism. You're like, well, Skynet's coming so I might as well help it get here faster. I don't know about that.
- [17:06]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah. Oh, it's definitely, it definitely writes off sort of your, your, your role in the whole play of like.
- [17:12]
Dr. Eric Fish
Well, yeah, you kind of wash your hands.
- [17:14]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah, it, it really is. The uncharted veterinary conference Medical Director summit is coming up. It is happening on September 15, 2026. It is a virtual event. It is meant to Minimize your time off the floor if you're a medical director and maximize your skill growth and your ability to implement what you're learning into your practices. I love to be a supporter of medical directors. I've gotten to work with medical directors all over the world, and I am thrilled to be hosting this year's Medical Director Summit. Registration is open right now, $199 to register and you can use the code medical to get 20% off on your registration. That is medical as your promo code. I would love to see you there. I love this event. That's September 15th. Medical directors head over to unchartedvet.com to get signed up today. Do you think that efficiency in pathology has been increasing? Do you know, do you feel like.
- [18:20]
Dr. Eric Fish
Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the data, some of my journey, I've worked at a couple corporate labs and the internal turnaround data obviously can't share, but it's quite fast. It's minutes per slide. I mean, the idea, the rate that we trained in a residency for your board exam, when the format was a little different, you had to read a whole flat of slides, was about 12 minutes a case, and you had one slide. Now, it was often a pretty challenging case, but you had 12 minutes per slide. That was kind of the benchmark rate. It's well below seven to eight minutes in most of the labs. And a lot of them are. You've got pathologists reading four or five minutes. It is lightning fast. And that's part of the burnout piece, is people feel like they're just turning and burning. They're not putting the thought in. You're like, well, maybe I missed something on that case, but I do not have time to call the client. I don't have time to look something up and give it a little bit more thought. And I think for people in a certain part of the profession, they may turn towards boutique labs. You're like, I want to work with a pathologist where I have a personal relationship. Maybe the volumes are lower, the price is higher, but that doesn't work for everyone. So most people are kind of pigeonholed into one of the big labs and it's very high volume.
- [19:22]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Is. Is the compensation in those labs, Is it done on a per case basis? Or. I mean, is there. I'm just trying to think in my. In my mind. What you're describing feels a lot like Uber. It feels like you flip on the meter and you drive for as long as you kind of want. And the number of trips you make or the number of miles you drive is kind of what you get paid for, and you flip the meter back off. Is that kind of where pathology is going into this kind of uberification of this part of medicine?
- [19:51]
Dr. Eric Fish
Yeah. So the old model was most people were on salary, and you could kind of think of it almost like as a form of pro sale where if you hit your expected benchmark, you would often get a pay by case bonus above. They're pretty modest. If you had to guess, what would you say, say, the pay by case bonuses at most of these labs?
- [20:08]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Oh, I, I have, I have no idea. I'm trying to think, you know, so we send in cytology slides. It's, you know, $300 to the clients. I'm like, I don't know, 20 or $30.
- [20:17]
Dr. Eric Fish
So there's a few places where you get that, but a lot of them, it's honestly about 8, 10, $12. In Europe, it's as low as $5 a case.
- [20:26]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Okay.
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Dr. Eric Fish
So, you know, you can see how people feel pretty squeezed. The, the salaries aren't great, the pay by case isn't great. And so some of the people who do want to make a lot of money and we all have huge student debt now, they end up just reading these astronomical case volumes. Incidentally, the number of slides you're supposed to read for cytology in human medicine in the US is legally capped at 100 slides a day. And I would say people in the big labs are often reading multiples of that every day.
- [20:53]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Wow.
- [20:54]
Dr. Eric Fish
It's very high volume. And yet the uberfication is definitely a thing that started to, frankly come with digital cytology and more of kind of freelance model. And I own up to, I started Lacuna Diagnostics and we relied a lot on contractors. So that was something we maybe contributed to. I've seen some people online ask the question if I feel any concern about introducing that to the profession. And yeah, I think I don't feel responsible for every way it was implemented. But I do worry that kind of setting up a ride share model may not have been the best thing. The counterpoint to that would be that has become the norm in radiology and they're doing quite well. So I think our roads have diverged. Even if the models are similar on paper.
- [21:34]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah, if I feel like if you hadn't done it, someone else would done it. Everybody's looking from an entrepreneur standpoint, everybody is looking at how to, how to scale, you know, the program that they do. Everybody is looking for how to have this model where you can, you know, have a Flexible workforce that can work as much as they want and then you can keep them as independent contractors. I don't think that there was anything shockingly novel. No offense, but I don't feel like there's anything shockingly novel about this that like, you know what I mean, other, other people wouldn't have.
- [22:05]
Dr. Eric Fish
Technology was the novel piece. Yeah, the idea, I mean, like the brick and mortar era with glass slides. There were contractors at all the big labs. So yeah, I agree with that. It made it maybe change the volume and the pace and the kinetics and some of the policies. But yeah, and part of this is, you know, I did, after vet school, I did a rotating internship. I worked ER relief for a number of years. I saw how impactful it could be when you couldn't get those cytology results for a few days. So, yeah, my driving force for going towards digital was to really get those results when they matter in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.
- [22:36]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah, well, there's something like if you said, oh, Henry Ford and his assembly line, look at all the pain that he brought and you go, well, it's a tool. Like this is a, it's a tool, it's a way of doing things. It's wildly efficient. It create a lot of opportunities. And there are some people who apply that tool in a less than ideal way. Or there's, you know, there's definitely people who have worked on assembly lines and been miserable and had their health and safety discounted and things like that. And so to me it's kind of the same thing. It's, it's, there's ways of doing things and you know, how do people apply those? I think the idea, you know, you look at the radiologists and they're, they're doing, they're doing quite well. I think that that's an important point in sort of how much, how much responsibility you take. How do you know, how do you, how do you feel about how things sort of, things sort of shook out,
- [23:22]
Dr. Eric Fish
you know, and to extend that further, we now pine for the days when everyone works these good manufacturing jobs on the factory floor. So now that things have gone towards the knowledge work economy, we have a different set of problems. But we're longing for this halcyon era that may have either never existed or not been as good as we remember it with the rose colored glasses looking backwards.
- [23:44]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah, I think I may be a bit naive in some ways, but I have this idea that I would like to see industry in America go towards this, not just maximizing revenue but having an optimization of revenue, like purpose, meaning like the goods you do in the world and then environment, which is how you treat your people. And so I just think, wouldn't it be great if you could have a profitable business that had a purpose and that you treated your people well? Like, is that too much to ask? And again, if, if you measure all of your success based on your quarterly earnings and your stock performance, it's, it's, it contradicts exactly what I'm asking for. But I miss, I miss those days. And I, you know, I would like to see, I would like to see more companies kind of focusing on balancing those things.
- [24:35]
Dr. Eric Fish
Absolutely. I may also be naive, but I was taught and I still believe good medicine is good business. And I think that there should be room for us to turn a profit with a good patient focused, client focused service. And I do think we've tilted more towards one side. But part of why that happened is for a long time veterinarians weren't particularly good business people. We didn't run things well and it was rife for having people with MBAs to come in and tell us how to lose less money.
- [25:01]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Yeah, no, I do think that we have made our bed to some degree for that, for that reason. Again, I, I love, I love being a veterinarian. I love vets. I, I think our, we had a pretty strong anti business mindset and I think it left the door open for, for others to come in and grab up opportunities that we were, that we were leaving hoping no one else would pick up. And so I think that that's, I think that that's something, that's something I wish we could go back and change, but I think I sort of. It is, it is where it is, Eric. It's five years in the future and the pendulum has swung back the other way and pathology is great. What does that look like? What has happened? Just leave me on a happy note of what happens if this is great? What happens if this really goes well from here?
- [25:52]
Dr. Eric Fish
Sure. Well, I'll take that into a couple pieces. So one on the volume and economic piece, the counter to a lot of my concerns is something called Jevons Paradox. And he was an economist in the industrial era in Britain and he noticed that when James Watt came out with his more efficient steam engine, a lot of these things that were consumed in terms of coal and everything else far from going down because it was more efficient, they shot way up. And it's since been applied to mean anytime a resource or technology makes something cheaper or More efficient, it tends to increase utilization of that. So we've seen that even in lab medicine. So in the old days, people did a CBC by actually doing all the different assays by hand. They would be doing a hemocytometer count, things that would be unimaginable today. But you really can't do 40, 50, 60 CBCs a day, even in a small lab doing that. So as we started to get these high powered instruments, both like a little point of care thing like a pro site, or bigger systems like a Sysmex analyzer or an Advia hematology analyzer, the volumes exploded and went way up. So the business side may work itself in terms of that, in terms of how AI is going to be applied to our workflows. The positive version of this is what we're starting to see in human medicine. So they have a lot of strict regulations that we do not at all have in human medicine. And so they have to treat AI and other forms of software as a medical device. So there's a lot of scrutiny in there. And as a result, their model has not been automated diagnosis straight to the end user clinician. It is more of an assistive capacity. So they do things like there are different softwares that predict a cancer grade. For prostate cancer, it'll give you a Gleason score and it'll show you its work and the pathologist can accept or reject it. So it makes things a little faster. But it's also a person in the loop calling balls and strikes. If we had a bunch of tools like that and it was very modular, I would actually love that. That would be great to be able to be like, hey, it caught something I missed on my fourth case of the day. That was really tricky. Some places are using it to triage up the harder cases higher in the queue earlier in the day, so that by the time you're burned out at 4, 5, 6 o' clock at night, you're reading your lipomas and your dumb stuff. But the hard, challenging cases, the suspected cancer cases come early in the day. I think that's a great use. Some of the uses we're seeing at some of the companies for radiology are great. They're applying vertebral heart scores or they're automated measuring of TPLO things. But they're not saying this dog is a stage two osteosarcoma, you should euthanize it. They're very applied tools that are going to be saving time, but also have the ability to be changed or accepted or rejected. By the clinician or the radiologist. So I think those two things. So the economics may sort itself out. And I think that if we start using this in a fashion where it's very much augmenting human intelligence, I think that that could make our role more interesting. We could be focusing more on the harder cases and not as much rote nonsense. I do worry that the piece in veterinary medicine is going to focus very much on the point of care. So people aren't even going to be sending those cases to the lab. That's where the analogy could break down from previous things. You know, there. Everyone says this time's different. Well, this time may be different with AI. I don't know that it will be, but I worry it might.
- [28:55]
Simparic Product Promoter
Yeah.
- [28:56]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Oh, Dr. Eric Fish, thanks so much for being here and talking through this with me. Where can people find you?
- [29:00]
Dr. Eric Fish
Online, obviously on LinkedIn. I post things there. A lot of it is cross posts for my newsletter, All Science Great and Small, which you can find. We've got in the show notes here. So I write a lot about AI, but that's not the only thing. I break down a lot of different studies. I write about some of the big macro trends in veterinary medicine for both the clinical side and the pathology side. So hopefully people enjoy it.
- [29:20]
Dr. Andrew Rick
Excellent. Thank you so much for all you do, guys. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. Take care of yourselves, gang.
- [29:24]
Dr. Eric Fish
Thanks a lot.
- [29:25]
Dr. Andrew Rick
And that's our episode. Thanks to Dr. Eric Fish for being here. Guys, thanks for tuning in. I hope this is interesting for you. As always, if you, if you like the episode, go ahead and do the things that people do when they like podcasts, like share, subscribe, send it to a friend. All of those of you, write a fan mail to me. I would take that. That would be a. That would be a thing that I would be okay with. Anyway, guys, I'm messing around. Have a wonderful day. Thanks for tuning in and listening. I'll talk to you later on. Are you an early career veterinarian, a new graduate, or a vet Student? This is Dr. Andy Rourke. And guys, I wanted to put something together just for you. I've got a brand new totally free newsletter. It only comes out once a quarter. It's definitely not meant to fill up your inbox, but I wanted to go ahead and just consolidate all of the information that me and the Uncharted Veterinary Conference are doing for early career veterinarians into one place. I'm going to be writing especially for this newsletter. We're going to have podcast episodes that are in here specifically for early career vets, new grads, vet students. We're going to have training resources, we're going to have certificate courses, we're going to have special discount codes that are just for you guys. And so if you're in this boat and you want some content, that's going to help you have an easier career, enjoy your time in practice, be more effective and happier as a veterinarian. Guys, this is for you. It's totally free. I'm happy to give it to you. Head over to Drandywork.comcareer vets. That's Drandy Rourke.comcareervets or you can find the link in the show notes. I hope this is really valuable for you. I hope that you'll check it out.