Inside veterinary urgent care centers

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Christie D’Andrea, DVM, founder of Veterinary Urgent Care Centers, felt trapped between the everyday life of a general practitioner but also overwhelmed by the life of an emergency room veterinarian. During this period of feeling helpless and stuck between the two, D’Andrea developed an ear infection that led her to take a trip to human urgent care. It was there that her epiphany to create Veterinary Urgent Care Centers was born.

During this episode of The Vet Blast Podcast, D'Andrea explains to host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, how Veterinary Urgent Care Centers is striving to create a healthy work-life balance for employees, plus common misunderstandings surrounding urgent care centers.

Below is a partial transcript. Listen to the full podcast for more.

Christie D’Andrea, DVM: I walked into an urgent care [for] myself because I had an ear infection and I thought, well, this just makes a lot of sense. And then I talked to my colleagues about it. And we were so siloed into GP and emergency that no one really thought twice about urgent care.

So, I basically decided I would just open myself up. I started originally just myself [with] 5 employees, 5 to 10 pm. And I just opened myself up and said, 'Hey, if anybody wants to see that I'm here.' And it quickly grew to an additional DVM [and then] more DVMs. That location ended up doing really well. We just patterned it after human urgent care. As a matter of fact, we use a certain scheduling software that I pulled directly from the human side because as I was putting this entire model together, I decided why reinvent the wheel. So I modeled Veterinary Urgent Care Center after human urgent care and how they do it on the human side.