How Vets Can Reduce Admin Time: 5 Practical Ways to Take Back Your Day
How Can Vets Can Reduce Admin Time?
Below are the 5 best methods that your clinic can adopt to increase efficiency and drive down costs.
1. Use an AI scribe for note generation
The single biggest time-saver available to most vets right now is AI-assisted note writing.
VetNotes, an AI scribe for vets, listens to your consultation and generates a structured SOAP note automatically (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan, with compliance language built in). The note drafts while you're still in the room. By the time the patient walks out the door, the note is ready for review.
In practice, that means reviewing and approving a draft in 90 seconds rather than writing the note from scratch. Across 20 consults a day, that's hours saved daily.
VetNotes integrates with your EzyVet workflow and directly with RxWorks, OpenVPMS, and Covetrus Ascend. The note goes straight into the patient record.
If you're spending more than an hour a day on notes, this is where to start.
2. Review the file before you walk in, not after
Walking into a consult without reviewing the patient history means you spend the first two minutes of the appointment doing what you could have done in 60 seconds before it started.
Before each consult, spend 60 seconds on the key history, current medications, and any outstanding items. VetNotes is soon releasing a Patient Brief feature that generates a structured summary from the patient record before the appointment, without you having to read the full history.
3. Standardise note structure across the practice
When every vet writes notes differently, the time cost compounds. Agreeing on a standard SOAP format across the practice doesn't constrain clinical judgment. It removes the friction of everyone inventing their own structure.
Even a one-page style guide covering what goes in each section and what compliance language is required is enough.
4. Use document summarisation for referral letters
A referral letter from a specialist or different clinic can run to dozens of pages. Reading it in full between consults isn't realistic. Not reading it before you see the patient is a clinical risk.
VetNotes' Document Summariser condenses long clinical documents to the key points: primary findings, recommended follow-up, changes to the treatment plan.
5. Audit which admin tasks actually require a vet
A significant proportion of post-consult admin doesn't require clinical judgment. It requires time. That's not the same thing.
Discharge write-ups, scheduling follow-up appointments, entering routine billing codes: these are tasks a trained nurse or reception staff member can handle if the right system is in place. Spend 30 minutes mapping last week's admin load and ask: does this require clinical training, or does it require access and familiarity?
None of these changes requires a full practice overhaul. Start with whatever is currently taking the most time. For most vets, that's the notes.
Want to save 60+ minutes daily on clinical note taking?
Book a 15-minute demo with the VetNotes team to get started today.
