Episode #94 – Jeremy Halperin

The Next Frontier
Jeremy Halperin shares his journey from technology leader to entrepreneur in Veterinary medicine. He discusses scaling Rarebreed Veterinary Partners, the evolution of data-driven decision-making, and the future of AI in animal health. Jeremy also explores how MeasureVet is helping practices turn insights into meaningful action.

Transcript

Stacy Pursell:
Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how successful people got their start and what led them to where they are today? Hi everyone. I’m Stacy Pursell, founder and CEO of The VET Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm specializing in the animal health industry and veterinary profession.
I was the first recruiter in the United States to focus exclusively on this space, building the first search firm dedicated to this unique niche. Over the past 28 plus years, I’ve developed relationships with many of the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The people of Animal Health Podcast features the incredible individuals I’ve had the privilege to connect with throughout my career.
In each episode, you’ll hear their stories, their career journeys, leadership lessons, and the impact they’ve made on the industry. With a wide range of expert guests, you’ll gain insights, inspiration, and ideas you can apply to your own career. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The People of Animal Health Podcast.
Today’s guest is Jeremy Halperin, a technology executive, entrepreneur and innovator who has spent more than two decades helping organizations harness the power of data, analytics, and technology to drive growth and improve decision making. Jeremy was a founding technology leader at Rarebreed Veterinary Partners, where he helped build the infrastructure that supported the company’s rapid expansion to more than 150 locations.
He is now the co-founder of MeasureVet, where he focused on helping veterinary organizations move beyond dashboards and reporting to actionable insights powered by reliable data and AI. Jeremy, welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. How are you today?

Jeremy Halperin:
Doing great. Thank you, Stacy.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Jeremy, I’m so happy to have you here today. I’d love to start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Jeremy Halperin:
So I grew up in Maine and went to school in Augusta, Maine, and that’s where I went to for a year in Florida as well. And then moved out on my own at a very young age, the age of 15. And from there, made sure that I could get into college and went to the University of Maine, Orono where I started my studies and then eventually moved from Orono down to Portland, Maine.

Stacy Pursell:
Portland, Maine is a beautiful place.

Jeremy Halperin:
Yeah, it was wonderful. It’s where I actually ended up finishing my degree and also starting my MBA and completing it there. While I was in Portland, I worked in the transaction processing space at a place called Wright Express, and I also worked at the company that invented the e-gift card, CashStar.

Stacy Pursell:
Oh, interesting. That’s super cool. Well, how did you get into the veterinary space?

Jeremy Halperin:
Lucky enough for me, I ended up going to work at IDEXX Laboratories, the leader in diagnostics worldwide. I went and I started managing some of their software teams in their research and development department. That’s where I managed Cornerstone, which I inherited. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with any of the versions, but I got Cornerstone right around 8.4 and between 8.4 and 8 NEXT when I think the market was screaming for it to be fixed.
I believe right before that, IDEXX had pushed out an inventory module that was giving everybody a lot of headaches. I came in and myself and the team put out the next version. And I think from there, honestly, Cornerstone started performing pretty well in the market, even though it was a 20-year-old platform. So basically my start in the veterinary space was at IDEXX in their R&D program.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, throughout your career, you have emphasized data-driven decision-making. What do you think most veterinary organizations are still getting wrong when it comes to using data effectively?

Jeremy Halperin:
I think this is not just only veterinary, I think this is multi-sites and corporations in general. I think with the current economic demand and the lack of data consistency and interoperability and availability that everybody is only focused on how many transactions are going through the location. I think where we are at a deficit is the ability, and I think this is PE in general, is the ability to operate a company because you don’t have the data available, but that also is leaning into the fact that people don’t understand who’s working at their company.
So when you only understand the transactions, for example, let’s just use an example. So I have a practice and it’s called Stacy’s Hospital. We have a CSR named James and James is actually calling every day as soon as he gets in and he’s clearing all the accounts receivable every single morning. He’s also looking at the schedule and he’s making sure to call out and pack the schedule for the next two weeks because he knows how to manage the schedule.
Well, the PIMS data that comes out of that and what’s reported to the corporation that owns that practice, there’s nothing that’s actually a telltale sign that James is doing such a good job. And so the goal for MeasureVet and one of the things that’s lacking is the 360-degree view of who’s working in your practice and what they’re doing to actually benefit you. I think that humanizes the experience of working in the practice and it makes people eager to actually go in and do a better job.
So I think we’re trying to attack this, Stacy, from, I would say we’re trying to humanize the problem. I think that many PE groups, and it’s widely known, are having trouble operating because they don’t have the data that’s necessary to operate and it’s hard to create an operating plan when you don’t have the data to support your assumptions.

Stacy Pursell:
You’ve said that reliable data is good. Interoperable data is great. Dashboards are stellar, but delivering outcomes by instruction is the game. Can you explain what that means and how organizations can move beyond simply looking at reports?

Jeremy Halperin:
Absolutely. So I think part of the story that we’ve covered was the history that I had at my former multi-site company that I worked at. The tool set for developers at the time was really point and shoot. And so it was very hard to do anything other than get data, try to make it make sense and be relatable and then put a visual on top.
With what’s happened in the last year and a half to two years, everything’s a command prompt with AI. And so if we look back 20 years ago, and you probably remember this, there was the big data and business intelligence push. Everybody was going to be a BI shop with big data and then everyone figured out it’s really hard to get the data together to make the pretty visuals.
And then finally, most people got some visuals going and they realized human beings don’t actually want to look at histograms and they’re not going to come in and look at histograms. And unless it tells them what to do next, it’s really just a histogram on a piece of paper or on a dashboard. And so what we’re really tailored to do and what wasn’t possible at my previous company is we’re bringing all the data together and then we’re using LLMs to actually look at the pristine data and help us with prompt-based decision-making.
And so think of yourself now having a suite of all of your revenue, all of your scheduling, the time and attendance again, your FP&A, so all your targets for everything that you do, your client comms, your inventory, and you can start asking prompt-based questions, are we overstaffed at this location for this day? If so, why? Show me a diagram of the revenue last year on that date to this date. Show me the difference.
What are we anticipating for the revenue on this date targeting the same producers are in that hospital? And that’s what we’re unveiling right now and that’s what we’re in the middle of. And actually that’s what I shared with your son, Noah. And I think that’s what’s so exciting as we push through and it’s not just VetMed, but as a computer scientist, as we push through into the next generation of just not just prompt-based, but also Codex and what AI brings us next, we’re bringing a sizzling dataset that makes sense.
So what happens with AI next, we are on that cliff, we’re ready to go and having the data together in a normalized set and interoperable, as you said earlier, is really the key to the lock for AI. So that’s where we’re trying to be and we want to be at prompt-based. I honestly, I don’t know if you’d like to weigh in on this, but I do believe that since we’ve gone to prompt-based AI, it’s a lot easier to get something done than actually pulling up a webpage and looking at two charts.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, AI is becoming one of the hottest topics in veterinary medicine. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for AI to improve practice operations patient care in business performance over the next five years?

Jeremy Halperin:
Yeah, the obvious one so far as describing, my wife happens to be a veterinarian, so I just appreciate that she gets home from work 30 minutes after close instead of two and a half hours. I also think that scheduling and understanding the ratios for a certain practice, I don’t think you can broad brush that across all.
Say you have a hundred two doctor practices, you can’t immediately claim that every doctor needs 1.5 vet techs regardless of the location. So it’s really, I think it’s not a one size fits all, but with the current data that we have, we can basically specialize each practice to what their working ratio should be for every day and we can also forecast how to fill their schedule.

Stacy Pursell:
And that’s huge.

Jeremy Halperin:
Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, as the founder of MeasureVet, tell us more about what problems you’re trying to solve and what inspired you to launch the company after such a successful career in technology leadership.

Jeremy Halperin:
Sure. I saw the benefit of what we tried to build at the former company and then with technology where it’s at right now, I’m like, “Why wouldn’t my partner and I share this with everyone? Why would we restrict this to one company? Why shouldn’t every veterinary consolidator and/or private practice have access to data at a very low cost since we’ve already solved the riddle?”
So at this age, you can’t see me on this podcast, but I’m about 52 years old. I just want to give back and so does my partner. And so our game is really how do we keep a price point so that anyone who wants interoperable data to report on, to run an LLM against, to use our services with, can afford it, they have access to it and it’s plug and play. So our goal here is to really give back to the veterinary community having information at their fingertips.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Jeremy, having worked in both high growth startups and large established organizations like IDEXX, what lessons have you learned about building technology teams that can scale while remaining agile and innovative?

Jeremy Halperin:
That’s a great question. Larger companies are a great experience. If you want to learn about how big projects are pushed through large corporations, some of the challenges there are that typically if you’re publicly owned, there’s a budget that gets spread across many teams and depending on the market conditions and how the stock is performing, that money can move in a different direction very rapidly.
And so what I’ve experienced at larger companies, for example, is I would have a certain budget and a certain team for a practice management system and the next quarter I would be asked to reduce that team and to reduce that budget, but makes it very, very hard to create contiguous improvement or continuous improvement rather, and also to keep the same team dynamic.
Now what’s interesting about a smaller company, and I did talk about this earlier with your son too, is that you really have the freedom to wear many caps and that gives you the ability to learn. The paycheck might be a little bit less, the title might be a little bit better and there are puts and takes, but I would say as far as the entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to work with a small team that can knock out a lot of work, it’s much better if you’re at a startup or a smaller company.

Stacy Pursell:
Mm-hmm. Well, you’ve worked closely with founders, operators, investors, and private equity groups. From your perspective, what technology capabilities make a veterinary organization more attractive to investors and more likely to achieve sustainable growth?

Jeremy Halperin:
What I noticed, especially with PE groups is that they’re willing to be patient with the operators as long as the operators have a plan. What I’ve failed to see so far in my journey is operators that have been able to bring all of the data together to support the board and call it a next day convenience factor. What I’ve seen so far is most of the multi-sites take about two or three weeks to get all their numbers together for the board of directors.
So I think for me, if I was on a PE group, what I would want is I would want a group of operators that could access their data next day at least and be able to give me reliable information. And the reason is I can’t predict growth and EBITDA percent growth or cost of goods growth if I don’t have those numbers at my fingertips. I would actually demand that with the current technology AI where it’s at that they have this working ASAP.
So I think the lack of information, plus Stacy, you know this as well as I do, is that when COVID happened, it turned into a buying spree. It was a spending frenzy. And then what happened is you know as well as I do as visits went down and now we’re in somewhat of a challenging time and the prices have already been increased as much as they can. The market can’t bear anymore.
So what’s left? What’s left? And I think what’s left is learning more about your practices, how they operate, getting rid of all of the fluff and making sure that you’re paying attention to the people that are actually operating in the site, because to me, they actually build the brand. Somebody asked me, “What do you consider?” Because I did a site health score. I have those as one of my metrics that MeasureVet offers.
And they said, “Well, what is that?” And I said, “It’s actually a combination of the health score of every employee that works in the practice because to me, the practice or the site of the hospital is just a bunch of bricks. It’s the people that work in there that actually make that brand. They’re the ones that people are coming in to visit. We also have different personality types that we look at.
Instead of just saying, who’s the highest grossing veterinarian, maybe you have somebody that grosses three quarters the amount of revenue, but their NPS or OSAT score is 5.0 or 10 if it’s an OSAT and they’re driving in two-thirds of your customer base. So I think not knowing those things, you’re just leaving a lot on the table with a workforce that’s already getting crushed. And so if we can provide plug and play for that, I think it’s obvious.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s a great point. Well, many veterinary groups have invested heavily in dashboards and business intelligent tools. What’s the next evolution beyond dashboards and how should leaders be thinking about turning insights into action?

Jeremy Halperin:
Absolutely. I think if any of the multi-sites or any of the corporates right now are trying to figure out how to get up the next Power BI dashboard, they’re behind. That was three years ago. So if you are a multi-site corporate, you’re invested in technology and your technology team still hasn’t figured out how to do Power BI and get your data all in an interoperable fashion, probably are behind the ball, behind the eight-ball because everybody now is moving to prompt-based computing and understanding through a text chat what they should do next, and the metrics are there.
If anybody that’s listening has used Cursor IE or Claude or Codex and ChatGPT, I mean, we’re at a point right now that if you have a dataset and you have a prompt, you just ask questions. Full stop, that’s just what you do. So yeah, I would say that right now, if I’m in a PE group or I’m looking at the next raise of a multi-site and at least their toes aren’t dipped in prompt-based computing with ChatGPT or Claude or some other AI mechanism, then they’re behind.

Stacy Pursell:
Hey, everyone. We are interrupting the episode briefly to talk to you about today’s sponsor. This episode is brought to you by The VET Recruiter. The VET Recruiter is the go-to executive search and recruitment firm in the animal health industry and veterinary profession dedicated to connecting exceptional employers with high caliber candidates.
With a deep understanding of the animal health industry and veterinary profession and a vast pool of talented candidates, we make the hiring process seamless and efficient for the animal health and veterinary employers who have critical hiring needs. If you are an employer in search of top talent or you work in the animal health industry or are a veterinarian ready to take the next step in your career, look no further than The VET Recruiter.
The VET Recruiter has placed many of the industry’s top leaders from CEOs to COOs to chief veterinary officers to VPs of marketing and sales and heads of R&D and chief scientific officers. We have built sales forces for many leading animal health companies and have placed more veterinarians in clinical practice than any other search firm in the US.
Ready to take the next step? Visit thevetrecruiter.com today, that’s thevetrecruiter.com. And now let’s get back into the episode. Looking at the veterinary profession today, what emerging technologies or trends do you believe will have the biggest impact on how practices operate and make decisions in the next decade?

Jeremy Halperin:
Well, there’s two sets. There’s two answers there. I think the private practice, what I’m looking at with the private practices we help because there’s a model out there that nobody’s really solved and I think the closest person to that is probably Martin Traub-Werner of VetBooks, the creator for VetSuccess. Getting people’s financials, or not peoples, getting clinics and doctors and professionals, P&Ls correct and reporting and accounting correct and then roping that into other practice data is genius.
It’s not a light lift, but it’s worth it. And I think the next step for private practice, and I’ve mentioned this part as well, I don’t know what other folks are going to do, but start partnering up with ally inventory. Start partnering up with somebody like PetsApp or AllyDVM, or what is that single practice footprint that turns into the interoperable data layer?
Instead of Stacy saying, “I want to have …” The PIMS doesn’t matter, I’ll be honest with you at this point. “I want to have ezyVet. I want to have QuickBooks. I want my inventory accounted for and I want reminders set on autopilot and I need an AI scribe.” I think you can get a lot done with that. If somebody comes out and figures out how to create an interoperable dataset and then in a highly integrated environment, that would be awesome because I’m helping multi-sites. I can tell you my passion is private practice and all the people that are really giving it a go.
I think for corporates, I think this prompt-based operating system is necessary. The restaurant business has this already. When I took a year off to basically study this, what we were going to do here, what I was going to do here. And I think the restaurant business, I worked for a gentleman that has 200 Cinnabons and the margin on a cinnamon bun is very low.
So if you don’t know who’s working, when they’re coming in, how much you’re paying them, how much what you order from your distributor and what your waste is, we’re not going to make any money at Cinnabon. And so what I realized right there is this exists. It just doesn’t exist in veterinary. And so I think someone’s going to figure this out. Someone’s going to make it easier for multi-sites and I don’t think this is going to be a build-your-own system for every multi-site. I think that’s actually a waste of cash.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, fascinating. So Jeremy, for veterinary leaders who may feel overwhelmed by technology, data integration and AI, what’s the first step they should take to build a stronger foundation and position their organization for future success?

Jeremy Halperin:
I think the most unsexy beast is security. Make sure that you’re secure. I know of a lot of practices and thankfully I already knew this from my days running Cornerstone at IDEXX, but there’s a lot of people that have on-premise systems that aren’t doing offsite backups and they get hacked.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s scary.

Jeremy Halperin:
It’s very scary. I know a practice in Maine that lost their entire dataset and had to restart.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow.

Jeremy Halperin:
Yeah, so that’s awful. So that’s number one. Number two is I think you have to lean into how do I get access to data from my vendors? I think Adam Wysocki has been really good about this with PIMS vendors and APIs. That’s one outlet of data, but I think otherwise practice owners and/or corporates also need the same level of integration from people like IDEXX and Covetrus.
I remember at my former company, we had Covetrus online pharmacy and I asked for my data and I got it once a month in a spreadsheet that I couldn’t comprehend. I can stick that into, I guess, ChatGPT nowadays, but the fact is that if you’re providing a service, you have to be able to provide the data points necessary for the consumer to understand what they’re doing with your business. And so if I was doing that, I think that’s still a gap in the market right now.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, you’ve had a fascinating career journey from software engineering and business intelligence to CIO, CTO, founder, and entrepreneur. Looking back, what experiences most shape your leadership philosophy and approach to solving complex problems?

Jeremy Halperin:
Sure. I think it comes back to where I started moving out at 15 years old. You get pretty good at solving problems. You get pretty good at surviving.

Stacy Pursell:
You had to be resilient.

Jeremy Halperin:
I had to be very resilient and stay focused and I had to believe in myself. I think that being unapologetic myself sometimes can be hard on others, but it’s also fulfilling to live my own truth. And so I guess for me it’s been grit, determination and compassion for others and myself. I think those have been the key ingredients for me to get where I’m at today.

Stacy Pursell:
What has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the veterinary profession?

Jeremy Halperin:
I think the most surprising thing has been the change from everyone who has wanted a closed system to now wanting an open system, that’s a pleasant surprise watching that happen and watching that unfold. I think the other surprise for me in VetMed, and I don’t know how others feel about this, I think it took me a couple years to realize, but going to VMX and being in the Hyatt and/or the Hilton and notice everybody is wearing a sports blazer and then you go to the expo and you see all the people that are actually generating all the work and I wish we could, I guess, refocus some of our energy from the Hyatt and Hilton into the quarters of the people that are entering into that expo, because I think that’s why we’re all there.
And so I think that was a huge wake-up for me in the last few years as I went there and I was just like, I guess it didn’t feel good. It feels like we should be much more focused on the people that are going there for education, getting CE and actually saving all the pets and animals that we’re trying to build businesses around.

Stacy Pursell:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veteran profession?

Jeremy Halperin:
I think that IDEXX and companies like them are going to use AI to create cures in a less regulated environment that hopefully we’re going to be able to use in human medicine. I think SDMA was pretty groundbreaking when IDEXX did that. I think from a data standardization and technology standpoint, I think that human medicine is ahead of the game and I’m hoping that some of the bigger players in veterinary technology pull their hands out of the pot and allow other people to innovate because I think it’s holding everybody back right now.

Stacy Pursell:
What’s been the biggest adversity or challenge you’ve encountered during your career?

Jeremy Halperin:
I think it’s hard when you buy into a vision that doesn’t end the way that you’d hoped or expected. I think my business partner and I both joined our former company hoping to change VetMed and to open up data for everyone. Eventually, that company, we hoped it would scale to 500 or 2,000 locations and that this dream would actually be helping more than 130 practices. That was hard when I think the vision of, well, when the economy turned down and buying stopped happening, I think for a lot of groups and pennies got tighter, I think it was a hard pill to swallow and it’s one of the reasons we’re bringing this to everyone is because that was the initial vision.

Stacy Pursell:
What advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Jeremy Halperin:
Oh, I would say find meditation as soon as possible and be compassionate on yourself.

Stacy Pursell:
And what messenger principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast?

Jeremy Halperin:
Interoperability is hard to say, but it’s not hard to achieve.

Stacy Pursell:
It is a hard work to say.

Jeremy Halperin:
But I think that it’s kind of like everybody’s been living in the last five years believing that it’s really hard to do because they’ve been struggling and everybody’s trying to fix the things they’ve been working on for five years and it’s hard to throw away what you’re working on, but right now with what’s available and the technology that’s available, it’s incredibly possible. It’s plug and play and that’s what we’re doing.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Jeremy, thanks for being here. I enjoyed our conversation today.