The veterinary profession has long faced significant challenges, with team shortages, heavy workloads, and operating models that struggle to keep up. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the profession’s vulnerabilities were laid bare.
It was during this critical period that Christine Stafford, President of Partner Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Center, ignited a bold vision: to reimagine emergency veterinary care from the ground up. Her approach? Compassionate leadership, strategic partnerships, and a willingness to rethink established norms.
Stafford's approach provides a roadmap for other leaders looking to elevate the level of care in their hospitals. In a recent interview, she provided her unique insight into how hospitals nationwide can tackle transformation from the inside out to build sustainable and scalable practices.
Challenging the Status Quo to Elevate Emergency Veterinary Care
For years, the veterinary profession has grappled with a chronic shortage of professionals, particularly those specializing in emergency care. This long-standing labor crisis reached a tipping point during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a perfect storm that challenged the profession’s traditional operating models to their core.
As the world grappled with lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, pet ownership skyrocketed as people sought companionship. This surge in demand for pet care services collided head-on with an already strained veterinary workforce, resulting in a tsunami of increased caseloads that overwhelmed hospitals nationwide.
Faced with this onslaught, some hospitals made difficult decisions, reducing operating hours or turning away non-critical cases to manage the influx. Others, already stretched thin by staffing shortages and overwhelming caseloads, simply lacked the bandwidth to evaluate and optimize internal systems and processes. Radiology, MRI, diagnostics, and scheduling — areas crucial to efficient and effective patient care — continued to operate using suboptimal processes and systems. Hospitals found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle, unable to dedicate resources to much-needed improvements while struggling to keep up with the relentless demand.
This crisis served as a wake-up call for Christine Stafford, who had spent 25+ years in veterinary emergency and specialty medicine. She was inspired to come out of retirement to reimagine the old model and elevate the level of emergency veterinary care in her community. She and her business partner Katie Brooks opened Partner Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Center, the first women-owned and led veterinary emergency and specialty care practices in Frederick, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia.
Reimagining Emergency Veterinary Care: A Team-First Approach
Partner Veterinary’s mission is to “transform the team experience and create an optimal environment for our team members, pet families, patients, and our partners we are dedicated to caring for.” Stafford believes that healing the veterinary profession and delivering the highest-quality care requires hospitals to reimagine their operating models from the inside out — and this begins with compassionate leadership.
Guiding principle 1: Active listening and reflection
After decades spent immersed in the veterinary profession, it would be easy for Stafford to make assumptions about her team’s daily challenges and the necessary solutions. Yet, this has not been Stafford’s approach. Rather than relying on preconceived notions or imposing top-down solutions, she has made active listening her guiding principle.
Stafford and Brooks immerse themselves in the daily realities of the hospital to foster an environment where every voice is heard and valued. From an anxious pet owner to an overworked veterinary technician, they listen intently to gather insights that would otherwise remain below the surface.
Guiding principle 2: Actionability
Active listening is nothing without actionability. Stafford and Brooks understand that acting swiftly and decisively is critical to earning the trust of their team, partners, and patients. They also recognize the importance of slowing down, taking a step back, and critically assessing the current state of operations. Through incisive questioning and a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions, they uncover the root causes of inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and pain points to implement targeted solutions. Her team lives by “If we are failing, ask how we are failing, and let’s fix it.”
Guiding principle 3: Accountability
Stafford and Brooks understand that their grit and passion are essential but not enough to uphold the Partner Veterinary mission alone. They recognize the entire team must approach their work with equal whole-heartedness. They lead by example, demonstrating the importance of taking necessary breaks while committing fully to their responsibilities when they are at work. "Katie (Brooks) and I make sure to show up fully and intently, so our teams do the same," Stafford emphasized, highlighting their shared accountability.
Compassionate Care Requires the Right Set of Partners
Stafford and Brooks recognized early on that to truly translate their team's insights into tangible improvements they would need to forge strategic partnerships with like-minded, collaborative partners. She sought partners willing to immerse themselves in her hospital’s operations to work not just as vendors but as an extension of her team, working hand-in-hand with their team to co-create customized solutions that addressed their unique challenges.
Among the myriad areas needing improvement, Stafford found that X-ray and radiology reporting systems were particularly ripe for transformation. However, she understood that overhauling such a critical component of her operations would require more than just off-the-shelf solutions.
“Running radiology is very personal for a veterinary practice,” she explained. “The technology and processes we employ directly impact our ability to provide accurate diagnoses and effective treatment plans. Choosing the right partner is a decision that carries immense weight – it's personal to every doctor on our team."
With this in mind, Stafford searched for a technology vendor that could not only deliver cutting-edge radiology solutions but also embrace her team’s high expectations for radiology expertise and their desire for tailored solutions. She was connected with one such vendor, Radimal, through a trusted doctor. She immediately resonated with the founders of Radimal, brothers Andrew Weismann, DACVR, VM, a veterinary radiologist, and Alan Weismann, an AI engineer, who matched Stafford’s ethos of active listening, actionability, and accountability.
An Innovative Partnership to Elevate Partner Veterinary’s Standard of Care
Before working with Radimal, radiology was a stumbling block that limited Partner Veterinary’s ability to deliver quality care. With the previous vendor, delivering reports could take hours or even days, which slowed down processes and resulted in sub-optimal care. The prior system was also time-consuming to work with. Rather than speeding up processes, the technology paradoxically slowed down already time-strapped staff by requiring them to enter data and imagery manually. This process could take more than 30 minutes per case. “With [the old] system, we often didn’t even understand the language of their forms,” Stafford explained.
With Radimal, Stafford discovered a partner who not only possessed deep radiology expertise but also embraced her commitment to collaboration and innovation. Together, Radimal and Partner Veterinary implemented a simplified solution that empowered practitioners to upload cases directly and eliminated the need to submit forms from a separate picture archiving and communication system (PACS).
The impact of this transformation was immediate. Radimal enables the delivery of fast, actionable, and board-certified reports in less than 30 minutes on average for STAT cases and in 3.5 hours on average for 48-hour standard consultations. Doctors can also review initial AI-generated assessments within minutes of acquiring images, providing them with quick insights into the next steps for care. "Every report gives someone an answer – quick, simple, down the entire chain," Stafford said.
Already, Radimal’s technology has supported over 5,000 Partner Veterinary cases and facilitated over 1,500 consultations.
Laying the Groundwork for Expansion
Stafford and Brook’s plan to expand Partner Veterinary’s operations to multiple locations. However, sustainable expansion hinges on a solid foundation built upon scalable processes and operational excellence.
In the near term, Stafford remains laser-focused on optimizing existing operations to streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and foster an environment that empowers her team to deliver the highest quality of care. “We have more people that want to work for and with us, and we would be doing a disservice if we didn’t look inward first,” she said.
Her continued collaboration with Radimal will be instrumental in this endeavor, enabling her team to iteratively refine existing radiology processes while anticipating the evolving needs of a growing multi-location practice.
Raising the Bar for Veterinary Medicine
Partner Veterinary's approach exemplifies how compassionate leadership, collaborative partnerships, and an openness to change can raise the bar for emergency veterinary care. Stafford and Brooks are paving the way for a future where healthy l work environments and exceptional care are not outliers but a standard across the veterinary profession.