VetRec's 50-Clinic Australia Deal Signals AI Scribes Going Global

More than 200 hours of clinical paperwork disappeared from a four-week pilot before this deal was even signed. That number is why Vets Central, an Australian veterinary group running more than 50 clinics, is rolling out AI-generated clinical notes across its full network this week, in partnership with VetRec.

VetRec expands into Australia and New Zealand

Vets Central and VetRec announced Tuesday that VetRec's AI Scribe platform is going live across more than 50 Vets Central clinics in Australia and New Zealand, following a four-week pilot that tracked 1,300 veterinary visits and saved more than 200 hours of administrative time. VetRec's platform generates SOAP notes, medical record summaries, and discharge instructions automatically from the clinical encounter, and integrates with the practice management systems clinics already run on.

Vets Central is an Australian-owned veterinary group with more than 1,400 team members and a Gold Coast headquarters, certified as a Great Place to Work. VetRec, based in the US, says its platform is HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliant and built to meet Australia's own privacy standards, with round-the-clock support for the international rollout.

Dr. Lachlan Campbell, Vets Central's chief veterinary officer, said the platform stood out during evaluation for clinical accuracy, ease of use, and the vendor's support during implementation. VetRec co-founder and CEO Kevin Cohen called Australia a critical growth market for the company.

Why saved minutes decide the AI scribe market

The 200 hours across 1,300 visits converts into roughly nine minutes of administrative time returned to each visit, an approximation built from VetRec's own two pilot figures over the same four-week period. Nine minutes doesn't sound like much until it's multiplied across a clinic that runs 30 or 40 appointments a day: it's the difference between a vet finishing notes after the last patient leaves and a vet finishing notes before the next one walks in.

That's the real product AI scribes are selling in veterinary medicine, not the transcription itself but the reclaimed minutes, and it's why the category has moved fast from novelty to infrastructure. The Underbite has already flagged AI scribe adoption as a tailwind pulling more diagnostic orders into structured records, and a 50-clinic international deployment is the clearest evidence yet that the tools have moved past pilot programs into default infrastructure at multi-site veterinary groups.

The broader veterinary technology market backs up the pace of that shift, even in categories AI scribes don't touch directly. A veterinary monitoring equipment market report from MarketsandMarkets projects the category to grow from $0.69 billion in 2026 to $1.03 billion by 2031, an 8.3% annual growth rate, with companion-animal applications alone accounting for 79.3% of that spend. The figure is a market-research estimate built from industry-expert input and the firm's own modeling rather than a tally of confirmed sales, and it covers monitors, not documentation software, but it points at the same underlying trend: veterinary practices are digitizing across every layer of the visit, not just the parts that touch a patient directly.

Neither company disclosed what Vets Central is paying for the rollout or how VetRec prices per clinic, so the deal's economics remain the one gap in an otherwise detailed release.

Whether AI scribes become a vet-group standard

Vets Central's deployment gives VetRec its first large-scale reference customer outside the US, and the clearest next signal is whether other Australian or New Zealand veterinary groups follow within the next two quarters. A second regional group signing on would suggest AI scribes are becoming default infrastructure for consolidated vet groups rather than a single operator's experiment.

The other thing worth tracking is whether Vets Central's own numbers hold at scale. A four-week pilot across a subset of clinics is a different test than a permanent rollout across the full network, and whether the time-savings ratio holds once every clinic and every vet is using the tool daily will say more about the platform's durability than the pilot ever could.

Source: VetRec and Vets Central via PR Newswire