Episode #96 – Dr. Neil Shaw

Future Intelligence
Board-certified Veterinary internist Dr. Neil Shaw shares his remarkable journey from co-founding BluePearl Veterinary Partners to leading Mars Veterinary Health and launching SignalPET. He discusses leadership, entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence in Veterinary medicine, innovation, and his vision for the future of Animal Health and specialty Veterinary care.

Transcript

Stacy Pursell:
Behind every successful career is a story worth hearing. Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. I’m Stacy Pursell, Founder and CEO of The VET Recruiter. Nearly three decades ago, I founded the first executive search and recruiting firm dedicated exclusively to the animal health industry and veterinary profession.
Since then, I’ve had the privilege of building relationships with many of the people who have shaped this industry, from CEOs and entrepreneurs to veterinarians, researchers, and trailblazers. This podcast is an opportunity to sit down with them and hear the stories behind their success, not just what they’ve accomplished, but how they got there.
The challenges they faced, the lessons they learned, the decisions that changed their careers and advice they wish they’d had earlier. Whether you’re building a business, leading a team, growing your career, or simply passionate about animal health and veterinary medicine, these conversations are designed to inform, inspire, and challenge the way you think. 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 Dr. Neil Shaw, a board-certified small animal internal medicine specialist, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential innovators in modern veterinary medicine. Dr. Shaw co-founded BluePearl Veterinary Partners, helping grow it into one of North America’s premier specialty and emergency hospital networks.
He later served as Chief Medical Officer for Mars Veterinary Health, overseeing medical excellence across more than a thousand hospitals worldwide. Today, he is the co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer of SignalPET, where he is helping transform veterinary medicine through artificial intelligence powered diagnostic imaging. We’ll discuss entrepreneurship, leadership, innovation, artificial intelligence, business, and the future of veterinary medicine. Welcome to the show, Dr. Shaw, and how are you today?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Stacy, I’m well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. This is fantastic. Appreciate it.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I’m so happy for you to be here, Neil, and I would love to start off at the beginning of your life. Where did you grow up and what was life like for you as a kid?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
It almost sounds cliche, but I’m one of those veterinarians who always wanted to be a veterinarian. It’s a sole focus through my earliest memory. I was born actually in South Africa in Johannesburg, and my father was a small animal practitioner. And we moved when I was young, we moved to Florida, to Tampa, Florida, and I grew up in Tampa.
And again, as long as and as far back as I can remember, myself, my brothers, we were cleaning kennels on the weekends, cutting the grass at the animal hospital during the week. And as I hit high school, was working in the practice throughout high school. So I don’t know many things. The one thing I do know is veterinary medicine. Literally, it’s been my lived experience.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, you know business too, and we’re going to talk about that too, because before we started recording, I told you that just last evening I was talking to somebody who said he rode on an airplane with you and said he remembers he spent 200 and something dollars for that plane ticket.
He says the best $200 he ever spent sitting next to you picking your brain about business. So I’m looking forward to discussing business and veterinary medicine with you. So Neil, you have enjoyed an extraordinary career as a clinician, entrepreneur, executive, and innovator. Looking back, what experiences most shaped your leadership philosophy?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think that when I was in school, specifically when I was in veterinary school, as a clinician, my mentor was Michael Shearer and Uncle Mikey as he’s commonly known. And from a clinical medicine standpoint, he was very influential. He was really very influential. I came back from a background of general practice. I saw general practice in retrospect as primarily a prophylactic sort of activity, vaccines, wellness, space neuters with the occasional medical case.
And through Uncle Mikey’s actions in tutelage, he opened my eyes to medicine. Medicine in the treatment of severe disease, the treatment of advanced disease, diagnosing, assessing, and Mike was very influential. From a business perspective, I think that I learned secondhand. I remember when I was a resident of Florida in Gainesville, it was realized that I single-handedly gave … we had something, I forgot what it was called, but we could write off accounts.
We could write off bills for clients if it was used for teaching purposes. It has a specific name, but I forgot what it was. And the realization came that I single-handedly gave away more in subsidies than the entire rest of the department combined. And then when that came to light, again, my mentor said, “Yep, you are going to fail in practice. You are going to fail in practice. You need to be able to charge for what you do.” And so again, he was influential.
The business came secondhand. The business really did. Veterinary medicine, all things aside, is very real to me. I enjoy the medicine. I very much enjoy animals. I have a strong respect for the role that they play in people’s lives. And that relationship between folks and the pets in their lives varies, of course. It varies significantly. And I think family medicine adjusts to that variability nicely.
And over time, not everybody knows the role of pets in people’s lives has changed. If anything, it’s become more and more significant. I anticipate it’ll continue to become more significant. And I’m pleased that family medicine can address that and offer different levels of service to different families. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
When you co-founded BluePearl in 1996, long before specialty hospital networks became common, what opportunity did you see then that others hadn’t yet recognized?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think there were two things. One is, again, I returned. I finished up my residency and decided to not remain in the university environment and decided to go to practice, and there were two principles. One is advanced veterinary care specialized, if you will, or advanced veterinary care does not need to remain at the time. It was roughly the 24 colleges, the 24 veteran colleges around the country, and perhaps two nonprofits, Angell n Boston and AMC New York.
And so at the time, specialized veterinary medicine didn’t need to remain in those two dozen plus hubs. It could happen in town, in any significant metropolitan area, in a metropolitan area of significant size. So it was the desire to do specialty practice, that’s one. And then the second, I think that was important for BluePearl was the focus on serving as a referral-only facility. Specifically, no general practice.
We didn’t do any general practice at the office or any of the BluePearl practices. No routine care, no preventative care, no primary clients. And that our role, and this is, I think, my background in growing up in a small animal practice helped a lot in that we defined ourselves as serving the needs of the veterinary community, the surrounding veterinary community.
And the way we served them is by serving their clients. And I think that philosophy held us in good stead. And the practice in Tampa grew significantly over three or four years. It grew to about 50 clinicians with a range of specialty services and emergency services. And then we had an opportunity to expand to New York City. And New York was admittedly a little intimidating.
I hadn’t spent much time in New York, and it has a high reputation for excellence. And we ended up taking that same philosophy, specifically specialty medicine, serving the needs of veterinarians through service to their clients. And it worked. It really didn’t work. And so New York City grew quickly. It grew very quickly, and then we expanded from there.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, building any company is difficult. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while growing BluePearl into one of the profession’s leading specialty in emergency hospital organizations?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think the challenge and the opportunity. The challenge was having the veterinarians, the community veterinarians, say in any one community, there’s anywhere from several dozen, depending on the size of community, to several hundred veterinary practices. And it was having the veterinarians identify that we really respected them. We truly respected them and have our actions show that.
In other words, if a client were to come in on emergency at night and they were frustrated with their veterinarian, that we’d call the veterinarian and say, listen, Mrs. Smith is here and she has concerns, and we’re here to help and work together to build the communication gap between Mrs. Smith and her veterinarian. If a veterinarian called for assistance, we would pick up the phone, make ourselves available.
And when a client was treated at a BluePearl office, they always went back to their primary care veterinarian. And so to build that trust level took time, it took experience. It’s one thing to say it. The veterinarians wanted a way to experience it. And what I noticed is when they experienced it was a very positive effect for all parties considered. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Many veterinarians receive extensive medical training, but very little formal business education. You talked earlier about how you learn business. What are some of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned along the way?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I would say the most important lesson is sincerity. I think sincerity goes a long way. It isn’t always popular. So some folks and some very well-meaning folks separate, say, the practice of medicine from the practice of business. And I don’t. And to give an example, if one has a very strong business approach, but a mediocre medicine offering, medical offering or medical approach, it won’t work. It really won’t work.
At the same time, you can be a tremendous veterinarian. You can be a really strong clinician and really trusted as a clinician. But if you have a poor business approach, that also doesn’t work. And you can see examples time and time again. Ultimately, there has to be a sincere approach in both business and medicine. And I would almost look at business and medicine as being the ying and the yang that make the whole.
And sometimes the medicine needs to yield to pragmatic business reasoning. And at some times business needs to yield to the needs of the medical needs. And so if you have a healthy respect between the two and a sincere approach between the two, then I think that’s the key. That really is the key. When we set up BluePearl offices, we always had a goal of having a strong medical anchor and a strong business lead.
And frankly, the relationship, the respect of the relationship between those two individuals really carried through to the practice. And if the veterinarians were concerned and needed the business to yield, perhaps purchase a piece of equipment that they otherwise wouldn’t have purchased, and it’s justified, then let’s make that purchase. Let’s really make that purchase.
At the same time, if everybody feels busy and the medical folks are short-staffed and we’re not quite there yet to hire an additional individual and we could explain the reasoning, then the medical folks would appreciate it and respect that when the business was on more solid footing, we could expand the team, expand the staffing. And so to have the business and the medicine working together and both being sincere and open, I think that was the key. That really was the key. And I would say that to this day. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
What do you wish veterinary schools taught future veterinarians about business leadership and entrepreneurship?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I don’t know if necessarily veterinary schools need to teach. On one hand, I’m using my own examples. I’m using my own experiences. So I hope this is correct. I don’t know if veterinary schools need to teach business. However, I hope that veterinary schools would prepare students that their experience in, let’s say, four years of veterinary school or the experience of the faculty is not the sum total of experience that you can expect.
So if veterinary schools can graduate students with an openness to practice, an openness that it’s a big wide world out there, that there are a variety of clients, there’s a variety of practice styles, there are a variety of communities in the United States. There isn’t just one way of doing things. Again, if you can be sincere and direct and transparent, that’s the expectation. There’s not an expectation of, say, not making a mistake because everybody will make a mistake.
I had a surgical mentor who also had some, I look back to my mentors a lot who had some words of wisdom and said, “Neil, if you haven’t made a mistake, it means you haven’t done enough. So of course, of course we’re going to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, let’s acknowledge them. Let’s acknowledge them. Let’s be open about it. Again, it may not be popular, but let’s acknowledge it. Let’s be open about it, and let’s move on.” And I think that if we can graduate veterinarians with open minds, that will only strengthen our profession.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, that’s such good advice. For veterinarians who want to become stronger business leaders, where would you recommend they start?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Open a veterinary practice. I think there’s no experience that beats hands-on, pragmatic experience. No training can beat experience. Sorry, that’s what I meant. No training can beat experience. Open a practice. Open a practice. Make yourself aware. And if you don’t own a practice, be aware of the financial aspects of your practice. Know what drives the income that you make. Know what areas that you can improve on.
Identify areas that perhaps you could change from a financial perspective. And again, square that with where you are medically. So square that where you are medically. And if you take that honest assessment, that honest assessment of your own practice, whether it’s your own or whether you’re functioning in a larger practice, but you’re in control of your own, if you will, your own book, see where you are.
See where you are medically, and then make decisions. Make decisions of where you want to be and act accordingly. If you identify where you want to be in five years, say, “I’m here today and I want to be there in five years, and there may be particular skills as a clinician, or there may be financially where I want to be.” Then make sure that what you’re doing today is working towards that five-year plan.
If you’re not working towards that five-year plan, that’s when I would reassess and change things up, but if you’ve got these goals and the experience you’re getting today counts towards those five-year goal, great. If it doesn’t, then you’re going to want to look to change things up. Don’t put things off. Don’t procrastinate your five-year goal. Identify it and work towards it. And there’s tremendous opportunity out there, tremendous. And you’ll be successful. You’ll be successful. You just go for it.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s good because if you don’t have plans and goals, you’ll drift

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Around. You’ll drift around. Nobody will deliver it to you. Nobody will give you that goal. Nobody will give it to you. The only person who can truly come up with that goal is yours. You can get perspective, you can get feedback, but only you can come up with that goal. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
So true. Well, after BluePearl became part of Mars Veterinary Health, you served as chief medical officer overseeing medical operations across more than a thousand hospitals. What did that experience teach you about leadership and maintaining medical excellence at such a massive scale?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I thought that it was a great experience. I really look back, and the time spent with Mars was a great learning experience. I saw business at a scale that frankly, I didn’t know existed. I saw what went into decision-making and processes that worked, processes that worked. A couple of things that I learned that I realized we could apply to veterinary medicine. One is consistency. Consistency of outcomes.
Can we work towards consistency of outcomes? That sometimes there’s individual variability, and I don’t want to take away from anybody’s individuality. To have a true result means that a good result means that it’s a repeatable result. Can we work towards repeatable results? That’s one. And the other is work as a team. And this is something I learned at Mars that held true. And that if you’re leading a team, this success is no longer about yourself. That those who report to you, if they’re successful, then you’ll be successful.
And sometimes it’s almost counterintuitive. Some folks feel, “Well, somebody’s doing great, but I don’t want them to get too good because they’ll challenge my position.” And no, that’s not true. Help those that depend on you to be successful. Help them to be incredibly successful. Help them to surpass yourself per se. It’ll always hold you in good stead. It really will always hold you in good stead. And those were two lessons I learned.
From a medical perspective, I learned one other thing in visiting a lot of hospitals and talking with veterinarians, and I’d put the veterinarians into three categories. I’d list them as a relatively new, maybe just several years, anywhere from a new graduate to several years out. Then I would say those who have been practicing for a fair number of years, say five plus, to pick a number, say five plus years that had a degree of confidence to them.
And then I would say older veterinarians who had been practicing say 15 plus years, 15, 20 plus years. And in talking with these colleagues, each had different perspectives. And I realized one thing about the profession. When it came to preventative care, when it came to vaccinations, when it came to deworming, when it came to routine surgeries across the board, we have protocols as a profession, and folks spoke with confidence.
Folks spoke with absolute, absolute confidence across those three groups. When it comes to medical care of the ill patient, whether it’s acute illness or an injury or it’s managing a chronic illness, any chronic illness, heart disease, cancer, even a chronic lameness. When it comes to managing chronic disease or when it comes to managing disease, acute or chronic, the confidence level literally fell off the cliff.
So for all three groups, when we talk about preventative care, strong. When we talk about managing disease, short-term or long-term, boy, those in practice I didn’t feel as confident. And that came through again and again and again. And I think that the realization that I had is something that I changed. I changed the approach. So BluePearl was built on the concept of there’s primary care and the difficult cases I recommended sending.
And I spoke to a lot of veterinarians, visited literally thousands of veterinary hospitals, and I said, “You should send those difficult cases.” And I remember me saying those, and I remember saying it in the practices. I remember saying it had lunch with practice associates and practice owners, and I remember at dinners and whatever, at meetings and what have you. I would say the same thing.
Looking back, I now look at it differently. And I think that as primary care practices, we should focus on medical care. And we do to an extent. Some practices do a great job of it, but I think we’ve got the preventative care part down. I think as a profession, let’s focus on medical care at the primary hospital. The primary veterinarian knows the client the best. It knows ultimately what they truly want long-term.
Do they want prednisone or do they want chemotherapy for a particular cancer? Do they want palliative care? Do they want definitive care? And often they’ve feeded two generations of pets or two generations of people, had a relationship with two generations of people. And so there is a lot more that can be done at primary care practice from a medical perspective than is currently done today. And I think that as a profession, we should move towards that.
We really should move towards that. From an economic perspective, I think it’s a necessity in that preventative care has become a commodity. It really has become a commodity, whether it’s food or nutrition or heart from preventative or flea and tick and what have you. Even routine testing, vaccinations, it’s been commoditized out. And the more we move towards true medical care, the better.
And I think that the next step, what’s missing is the ability to standardize that care and to enable practices to practice medical care, managed short-term and long-term illnesses when we standardize that care as a profession. And that has actually been a good bit of the focus, is to standardize high quality medical care beyond the preventative model.

Stacy Pursell:
Neil, today you’re helping to lead SignalPET, one of the pioneers in AI-powered veterinary radiology. What inspired you to focus on artificial intelligence, and why did you believe this technology could have such a meaningful impact on veterinary medicine?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I thought it was actually pretty straightforward. There were two components to it. One is that with the development of AI, image recognition on radiographs simply isn’t obvious. It’s simply an obvious. AI is beyond powerful. And the more I experience it, and we’ve been doing it now since 2018, so about eight years. And today I would say it’s even more powerful than it was six months ago and certainly more powerful than it was several years ago.
It really is capable. And they can take an image and it doesn’t look at an image like you and I look at an image with our eyes. It’s a mathematical equation. And we don’t even see the math. It works so well, we don’t even see the math, but an image is a pixel. And a pixel is a number. And the pixel next to the pixel is also a number. And the combination of pixels next to each other are more numbers. And computers are very good at numbers.
They are very, very, very good at numbers. And so to translate that, the computer vision, if you will, and we refer to it as vision, image recognition is a very obvious capability of AI. And the second component is to look at our profession. If we look at our profession and we look at something as integral as radiology, and it’s integral because there is pretty much, at least the ones that I’m aware of, and I’m aware of most of the states, by state law, every veterinary practice has to have a x-ray or x-ray machine within the practice, and it’s one of the most expensive rooms in the practice.
By the time it’s built out with digital x-ray and what have you. It’s probably the one of the least utilized resources in the practice as well. Veterinarians are used to looking at their own films. Comfortably, at least 90%, if not greater than 90% of films stay within the veterinarian himself or herself. It never goes beyond the veterinarian itself.
If you or I or anybody listening to this podcast went ourselves or took our child to a physician and the physician took radiographs or sent us to a center to take radiographs, we would ask for the radiologist report. Absolutely. We wanted to review that. We would ask for the radiologist’s report. We wouldn’t say, “Well, what do you think? And just do me a favor, give me your best guess.”
We would say, “What’s the radiologist say?” And the same thing applies in veterinary medicine. We often have clients reaching out to us and say, “Can you interpret?” Excuse the vernacular, but I had x-rays taken at my veterinary practice and I’d like to get a formal read, which we don’t do. We don’t offer that service. I don’t know how they find us. Somehow they internet search, they find us and we decline and say, “Please go back to your veterinarian.” But that need is there. It’s screaming.
It’s really screaming. And because what the clients are going to do is they’re going to take that report and they’re going to read it themselves, and then they’re going to enter it into ChatGPT. So they’ll take their blood work and they’ll take their radiograph findings and today they’ll enter it into ChatGPT and they’ll say, “Was my veterinarian correct or not?” And I think we need to recognize that because it’s happening every single minute of every single day.
And it’s going to happen more tomorrow than it did today. And January 1 of 2027, it’ll happen six times more than it’s happening in August 1st, soon to be August 1st of 2026. And so let’s meet the need. Let’s not fight it. Let’s not argue it. Veterinarians have nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about. Let’s meet the need. We’re in the information age. Folks want information. They desire feedback, they desire objectivity.
They’re searching for opinions and second opinions. We don’t have to be challenged by it. We can see this as a good thing. Let’s meet the need from a medical sense and a financial sense. Folks are asking for more. Let’s simply provide it. Let’s simply provide it. And everybody wins. It’s a scenario where everybody wins. The pet family wins, the veterinary practice wins, and frankly, the pet wins as well.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, it makes sense. And artificial intelligence generates both excitement and skepticism. What are the biggest misconceptions veterinarians have about AI today?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
We are used to a gold standard, which is radiologists. We are used to that as a gold standard, and it’s a healthy gold standard. A board certified radiologist is a healthy gold standard. What we don’t know is what does that actually mean objectively? If a radiologist reviews a film, we have a great deal of comfort in that signature. And rightly so. Rightly so.
By and large, radiologists really do an excellent job and they add a lot of value to the equation. The challenge is there are nowhere near enough radiologists to meet the need. And so there has to be an additional solution, and that’s where AI comes into the equation. The other thing is we don’t know what is the quality control of a radiologist.
And to this date, I’m not aware of any real studies that have looked at quality control of radiologists. So the quality control of AI is rightly and often questioned, and it should be questioned. Absolutely. It’s a new technology. It’s a little scary to many. It should be questioned. It should make sure that it’s correct and it’s right.
Then the next question is, what do we compare that to? And currently, there’s no objective standard to compare that to. So there’s no objective. And so I think that’s one misconception. And I don’t know if we need to necessarily dwell on it. What we need to do is as clinicians, make sure that the AI makes sense to us. Yeah, I’m sorry.

Stacy Pursell:
No, but you go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt.

Dr. Neil Shaw:
No, no. I think that we need to make sure that the results make sense. I don’t question the results. I don’t question the results. Or if I question the results, these are the questions. And what we do is not only do we track every single pixel that is identified and the answers, we actually track the feedback and the impressions and the queries that come up of the results. It’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of data. And we track the radiologists, frankly.
We work with 30-something radiologists, great, great individuals, really tremendous individuals, and we track their results as well. And so we’re comfortable that the AI is a tremendous solution. We’re comfortable that it’s a tremendous solution that works together with radiologists, and we’re comfortable in a strong future for the profession and for all. I think many attack it out of fear and then kind of fill in the blank reason, “I don’t like it because come up with a reason. I don’t like it da, da, da, da, da.”
It’s interesting. A lot of folks that have attacked say, since we are the leader of the AI right now, we are the first ones that came out with AI interpretational radiographs, and now there’s roughly six companies or so, six or seven companies that do so. But folks generally look at us as the leader, so we tend to get singled out for criticism, if you will. And so what’s absolutely remarkable is that folks will take to the podium or give a talk and talk about SignalPET as if they have actual knowledge.
And consistently, these are the same folks that prior to the talk, because they make a little noise. And so I reach out to them and I say, “Look, I’d be happy to talk with you. If you have questions, I’d be happy to show you. I’d happy to review data. I’d be happy to go through workflow and mechanisms.” I never get a response. I never ever get a response. And after they make a comment, I will reach out again and say, “Look, I understand you have concerns. Let’s talk.”
Crickets, absolute crickets. So I understand that people are nervous. I understand that AI seems threatening. It’s not. It’s not. It can be done smartly. The biggest threat is that 90% of films don’t have a reading and that clients are concerned that their veterinarian just, whether they say it or not, they go home and say, “Well, my veterinarian says he thinks it’s this or she thinks it’s that.” And the family member says, “Well, what does the report say?” Well, there’s no report. That should be the bigger concern, and that is the bigger concern.

Stacy Pursell:
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Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think they simply should try it out. They shouldn’t feel pressure, but if they want to move ahead into modern times, they should try it out. And I think that there’s two things that AI offers. One is image recognition and different companies will have different strengths and weaknesses just stated upfront that different companies will have different strengths and weaknesses from image recognition.
And then whether by and large, they’ll receive a interpretation of image recognition that the heart is big or the heart is not big, the left atrium is there, the left atrium’s not there. It’s consistent with congestive heart failure, it’s not consistent with congestive heart failure. And that’s there. I think the next step or the next level of AI is something that we’ve now gone into, which is actual assessment and recommendations. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier with standardization of care because we know that we can medically manage cases based on objective criteria, an objective criteria of the signalment, the history, and the radiographic findings.
And if we have access to those three criteria, signalment, clinical history, and radiographic findings, then objective recommendations can be made that are of great value. And when I was in practice, this wasn’t possible without referring the case or having some faculty member or some specialist who you happen to have a relationship with, a professional relationship, and you could call them up and have a half an hour conversation on the case, which is unusual these days.
Now it’s available for a few bucks. Really in relative speaking, a few bucks. And frankly, we do it the world over. We really do it the world over. And I think that opportunity is being missed. So it’s not whether you use AI, you don’t use AI. It’s you have an opportunity to really be presented with a set of facts and a diagnostic or therapeutic recommendations.
You may or may not choose as the practicing clinician, as the treating clinician, you may or may not choose to follow, but you’ll have options to choose from. And to do that at really in cost that is not significant and a turnaround time that is frankly within minutes, it’s hard, I think, that folks would not want to want that once they become aware. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Looking ahead five to 10 years, where do you believe artificial intelligence will have the greatest impact beyond radiographic interpretation?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think, Stacy, I might get a little bit into trouble, but I’m going to go for it if that’s okay.

Stacy Pursell:
You go for it.

Dr. Neil Shaw:
All right. I’ll go for it. I think AI, I’ve already said, many companies now offer recognition, looking at films and vision recognition, image recognition, and we’re moving beyond into decision support. So looking ahead five years, AI is going to be able to provide decision support and provide very strong decision support.
So then the next question is, what is the role of the veterinarian? And I think that very similar to human medicine, the veterinarian is going to be seen as, one, somebody who does procedures, somebody who makes final decisions on treatment plans, whether they be therapeutic or diagnostic, the final decision maker. But a lot of the eyes and ears and hands and interaction can be done with folks that don’t require a veterinary degree, and that will be good.
So just like I’ll go in for a routine annual checkup and I’ll see a PA, and I know that the physician is in the background and it confirms everything that the PA is being seen or my child has something minor, but we have to be seen today and they fit it in and we see the nurse practitioner. And we’re very comfortable with that setup knowing that it’s overseen by our pediatrician, our physician.
I think when there is adequate decision support available, then we will enable better service to the pets, better servants to the pet families, and we’ll be able to offer it at a more cost-effective manner that it’s doing now. And I think that veterinarians, I’m going to now wear the business hat, veterinarians will be able to not decrease, but increase the income by taking a more responsible role and less of a role in spending time doing things that folks earning less can do. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Neil, you’ve watched veterinary medicine evolve over several decades. What changes have surprised you the most?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
We sold in 2015 being BluePearl. And so we sold to a large global company in 2015. And back then I thought, “I think we’re close to the peak of consolidation. It’ll happen, but it won’t happen that much.” And I was surprised that that went on for another decade or so, literally another decade. So that process of corporate consolidation went through for another 10 years and it increased. And I think that it enabled a lot of veterinarians to exit in a very healthy way, which is great.
I’m not convinced it added any real value from a medical perspective or from ultimate from a professional perspective. I’m not convinced that the corporate medicine has done that. And I’d be open to a discussion with folks should they like to have it, but that’s some surprise that the corporate consolidation went as far as it did. And I’m disappointed that I don’t see a strong value add as a result of corporate consolidation.
And I think if we look at today where we have costs that have gone much, much, much higher than the rate of inflation without a parallel increase in services, it concerns me because I don’t think that’s healthier to the profession. And I think it’s okay to charge more for increased value, increased service, but I don’t think it’s okay to just increase costs without increasing value and service in parallel.
And so that’s been a little bit of surprise, but I think that ultimately market forces will rectify that, and I think it’s already beginning to happen. And the corporate consolidation has slowed down. I think that the corporations should take a secondary role and support the professionals. I’m a little concerned that the corporations see them in charge of making medical decisions.
And there may be committees and subcommittees and they could buy it with practice acts with certain committees. But in reality, my observation has been that they do try to dictate medicine and decisions of veterinarians. And I would like to see decisions regarding medicine to go back to the hands of veterinarians, not corporations.

Stacy Pursell:
Where has the veterinary profession made the greatest progress?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think veterinary medicine has really worked to respect that companion animal bond that has become stronger and stronger and stronger. And I think we’ve made over, and now I’m looking over several decades, we’ve made great progress in that. We’ve really made great progress. And when I look at my own experience, we truly prioritize treating the pet as part of the family.
And that’s appropriate because that is how it is perceived by the family. And so I think that is fantastic. I think that as we learn to deliver medicine, I would say medicine at scale in a … Actually, excuse me, if I may rephrase that. As we learn to develop quality medicine at scale, not just in select hospitals or referral practices, as we learn to deliver quality medicine at scale, I think that’s our next evolution. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
And where do you believe we still have the most work to do?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think that we need to step away from the preventative care model and engage the medical model. I think that we should not look at the preventative care model as a revenue driver. I think it could support, be supportive, but I think we should embrace medical care as the primary function of a veterinarian. And years ago, and I’m saying years being several decades, I remember there was resistant to low-cost spay and neuter clinics and resistance to humane society, spay and neuter practices, or pop-up vaccine clinics and such.
And I think I also frankly remember when there was resistance, I’m old enough to remember when there was resistance to mail-order pharmacies. There was strong resistance to that. And those barrels you could say have been lost. It’s routine now to. I get for my own pets, I order by mail their medicines. I think that preventative care is important to maintain the relationship with the family.
No doubt there are components to that care that is essential. The true care is in treating the pet when it’s not well. And whether that’s vomiting and diarrhea on a routine basis or limping on a routine basis or significantly ill, as we shift towards that model in primary care practice, I think it will be a stronger profession.

Stacy Pursell:
Neil, if you were the dean of a veterinary school for one day, what changes would you make to better prepare graduates for the realities of today’s profession?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
If I were the dean of a veterinary school, I would seek to empower the graduates and to empower the graduates, have them identify how they can be most effective as clinicians without doing everything themselves. We still tend to graduate veterinarians. And I love the James Herriot books, and I read those books again and again and again when I was young. We still tend to feel that we have to do everything ourselves.
And if we look across the aisle at human medicine, they’ve realized that a physician doesn’t do everything themselves and can still be very successful. And so I would empower graduates to say, “How are you going to make veterinary medicine better? How are you going to be a great clinician? And by the way, how are you going to get there so you don’t have to do everything yourself? Because if you have to do everything yourself, it’s going to be very difficult.”

Stacy Pursell:
If you could look into a crystal ball, what will veterinary medicine look like 10 years from now?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
I think we would’ve standardized a lot of care. So for example, when we have a coughing chihuahua and that’s 13 years old, instead of saying, “Well, that has a heart murmur, a coughing chihuahua with a heart murmur.” Instead of saying, “Oh gosh, I got to get this to a cardiologist immediately.” We’ll know we can take radiographs, assess its heart, assess it’s left atrium, assess it’s a trachea and assess its main bronchi and assess the caudodorsal lung fields.
And we’ll know exactly whether it’s a collapsing trachea, whether it’s a mitral insufficiency with a large left atrium, or whether it’s a congestive heart failure or whether it’s something unusual. And if it’s any of the above, we know exactly how we’re going to approach it. And only when it proves to be a variation from the norm, then it’s time to go to a specialist. But that a veterinarian in practice will be able to take a 13-year-old chihuahua with a heart murmur that’s coughing and confidently know that they can do one or two diagnostic tests in-house, radiographs, and maybe some basic blood work, and can manage that pet for the next six months to 24 months themselves.
And if it proves to be difficult to manage or if it proves to be an unusual case and there’ll be a rule set of when to escalate, then it can be escalated to a specialist. And I think that will become the routine rather than, “Ooh, there’s a 13-year-old coughing chihuahua. I’m a little nervous approaching this. Let me send it to somebody.” And I think that doesn’t do. I think once we have decision support, and no doubt, I’m partial towards AI, and I have strong believe in decision support. And once we have strong AI and strong decision support, then we as a professional will be able to do that. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Many veterinary professionals have ideas that could improve medicine, but hesitate to pursue entrepreneurship. Based on your experiences founding BluePearl and SignalPET, what advice would you give someone with a great idea who is wondering whether to take that first step?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Go for it. Just go for it. Go for it. Gain a perspective of a couple of folks, get some feedback. Some you’ll agree with, some you won’t agree with. If you’re gaining the perspective of somebody, tell them in advance. Say, “Look, I’m thinking of doing X, Y, or Z. And I’m gathering several opinions. Can you tell me what your opinion is?”
From somebody who’s asking, the person you’re asking would like to know, “Okay.” So I’m going to give an opinion, they’re going to get a couple of opinions, and that’s respected. You’re going to choose what’s best. Get a perspective and then go for it. And in most cases, frankly, if it’s well though, it’ll work out. And we live in a country and we live in a society, and we have an educational background that makes it possible, and that’s fantastic.
And if we look around the world, that’s actually not common to have that combination, to have that educational background, to have a society that supports it, and to have the opportunity to try something new. And so we live in a great age, and so I would say absolutely go for it. And not guaranteed it’ll work out. If it’s well-thought-out, it’s more likely to work than not. And if perhaps it doesn’t work, guaranteed it’ll be a strong experience that we’ll use to grow to the next idea.

Stacy Pursell:
If you don’t try, you don’t know.

Dr. Neil Shaw:
If you don’t try, you don’t know. Absolutely. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
What has been the greatest adversity you’ve had to overcome during your career, and what did it teach you?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Actually, something personal. I’ll say something personal. And I speak now as a grandfather who just had his sixth grandchild born yesterday.

Stacy Pursell:
Congratulations.

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Thank you. Thank you. For my generation, it’s hard to … We found it … I speak as a generation, I’ll speak as an individual. It’s very difficult to balance work and family life. And we tended to choose one or the other. We tended to choose one or the other. To point, my wife is a veterinarian as well, and she chose to be with the family, and I chose to be at work. That was her decision, and that was my decision, and it happened to work.
I think that especially with the way society is progressing, the way technology is progressing, you don’t necessarily have to make that choice. And I would not strongly choose one over the other. You’ve got to make time for work. And if you’re successful at work, you’ll make time for the family and vice versa.
You make time for the family, you got to make time for work. And to work that out, to me, actually, it’s been challenging. It’s hard, and I’m not saying it’s easy, but I would encourage folks to embrace that challenge and not just choose one or the other. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
What daily habits or routines have contributed most to your success?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
What daily habits? Two things. One is absolutely staying involved. Absolutely staying involved. It’s staying aware. And no doubt you work as a team. And the best thing I’ve said is to work as a team. Stay in touch with that team. Stay in touch with that team and make sure that if you’re not touching the actual work experience yourself, each responsibility or duty, which you can’t as you go along, that those who are, are doing it well.
So you have to delegate, but when you delegate, it’s your responsibility to make sure that that team is successful. And at the end, if somebody is not successful that you’ve delegated a responsibility to you, that you’ve delegated a responsibility to, then it’s actually you. If I delegate something to somebody and they’re not successful, then I see that as my failure rather than their failure. That’s my responsibility. And being on both sides of that again and again and again, to me, that has worked for me.

Stacy Pursell:
If you could sit down with your younger self just graduating from veterinary school, what advice would you give?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Work really hard and remember one day you won’t be at work. So prepare for that as well. And I don’t know if I’ve listened to that advice. I don’t know if I’ve listened to that advice, but that’s what I would advise myself.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, that is hard for some people when you’re going at such a fast pace to slow down and focus on something new.

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Yes.

Stacy Pursell:
Is there a book that’s had a profound influence on your thinking, leadership, or career?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
There is. There is. And please allow me a little bit of liberty to explain. The Torah or the Bible has had a profound influence. And if we not discuss a religious component at this point, we not discuss a religious component, but we identify something that one way or the other was written several thousand years ago. And when you look at the essence of human interaction and human nature, fast-forward 3,000 years and we’re still the same people, human nature has not changed.
Human interaction has not changed. And when there’s a realization that we are really human after all, it’s actually comforting. It’s actually comforting. And I think you don’t have to be intimidated. Whether you’re used to folks in your own community or your own town and your own city or your own state, and you look at folks in another city, town, or state, and you’re a little concerned, you don’t have to be concerned because the vernacular, the way of speaking aside and the way of doing things and how we dress and the vehicles we drive or what we profess to know and what we don’t profess to know, or if you think very highly of somebody or you don’t think highly of a person, it’s actually all immaterial.
It’s really all immaterial. We are just human after all. We are just human. And we are the same humans as we have been for thousands of years. And once you have that realization, I think actually life becomes more enjoyable, less intimidating and more enjoyable. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
What principle or philosophy has guided you throughout your life and career?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Sincerity. You have to be sincere. You have to be sincere. Enough folks who accuse you of being insincere, that you have to be sincere to live through that, and that’s one. And two is you have to take confidence in yourself. Be open to feedback and have the confidence to be open to feedback. And usually my experience has been folks who are not that open to feedback actually lack confidence. So you have to have the confidence to be open to feedback. And that’s sometimes an acquired trait, but one can develop it. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
When your career is eventually written about decades from now, what do you hope your legacy will be?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Truly, I’m hopeful and I expect, and I know that veterinary medicine will be successful. I think, again, it’s been my life. It’s been wonderful. I don’t think I need to be written into that story. I really don’t. I really don’t. I think that as the profession develops, as colleagues develop, as we serve clients, as we serve patients, really that’s fantastic. As far as myself, I actually don’t need to be written into that story. So I think that, yeah, I don’t look at legacy that way. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, finally, Neil, you’ve got the microphone. What’s one message you’d like to leave with everyone listening to The People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic today?

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Stacy, I would say my earliest memory is veterinary medicine. Today, most of the hours of day are occupied by veterinary medicine. I remain awed and fascinated by what we do. Absolutely awed and fascinated what colleagues in veterinary medicine do, what practitioners do day in and day out, and it’s hard.
It’s hard what we do. It is. It’s difficult. And I am absolutely inspired by those I interact with and those around me. I think that there are challenges we have and there are things that we would prefer not to happen. I would say, “Don’t worry about it. Just ignore it. Stay true. Stay true. Fight the good fight.” I think it’s a wonderful career. It’s a wonderful profession, and I wish folks the best of success in it. Yeah.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Neil, it has been a pleasure. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for being my guest today on The People of Animal Health Podcast.

Dr. Neil Shaw:
Stacy, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me.