As Veterinary Specialist Partners (VSP) + Urgent Care in Louisville, Kentucky, and Evansville, Indiana, expanded from a two-doctor startup into a two-location specialty and urgent care practice, its early systems became harder to carry forward. Instinct EMR helped VSP build workflows around its hospital, onboard new team members quickly, and spend less time completing records after hours.
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The Problem: VSP’s Early Systems Couldn’t Keep Up With Its Growth
VSP began with Grace Clark, DVM, DACVIM, her business partner, a small outpatient caseload, and Microsoft Word. At that size, a Word document could serve as the medical record.
As VSP added staff and patient volume, the practice moved to a specialty-focused EMR. But the system required too many steps to move each patient through the day and complete the medical record. What had worked for a small operation began creating more work as the practice grew, including paperwork that followed the doctors home at night.
“The problem became throughput through the system,” said Dr. Clark. “ There were a lot of pieces. It was a bit time-consuming for us once the volume got heavier. That’s what led us to look for another EMR that would allow us to be more efficient and move not only our cases through the day in a better way, but speed up our paperwork that we were having to do at night.”
The turning point came when VSP prepared to open a specialty and urgent care hospital in Louisville. The team wanted to give its internal medicine clients somewhere familiar to turn when a complex patient needed care on a Friday night or Sunday. That idea quickly grew into a hospital operating seven days a week from 8 AM to 10 PM.
The expansion brought more patients, employees, invoices, follow-ups, and moving pieces to manage. VSP also sends diagnostics to commercial laboratories and academic institutions, so its next EMR needed to track what had been ordered, when results returned, how those results were communicated, and what needed to happen next. That information had to remain easy to find when a patient returned through urgent care and the original specialist was not in the hospital.
“We really just needed a system that kept track of what went out when and what came back when, how that was communicated, and folding that into the medical record in a seamless way where things weren’t hidden and didn’t get lost,” Dr. Clark said.
Many of the systems VSP evaluated centered on general practice workflows such as vaccine tracking and appointment reminders. VSP needed something different: an EMR capable of supporting complex specialty cases, send-out diagnostics, urgent care visits, and communication across services.
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The Solution: An Adaptable PIMS With a Go-Live Built Around VSP
Clark and her business partner were already familiar with Instinct Treatment Plan from a previous specialty hospital. They had seen how quickly Instinct responded to feedback and continued improving its products. As they considered Instinct EMR for the new hospital, that adaptability stood out from systems that had remained largely unchanged for years.
An Instinct implementation specialist spent two to three days with the VSP team, helping Clark and her business partner configure the system around their hospital. Clark could describe a problem or explain how she wanted a process to work, then review practical setup options with the specialist.
“It wasn’t this like cookie-cutter, ‘This is how you’re doing it,’” said Dr. Clark. “It’s more of, ‘Here’s our platform. This is what it can do.’ And then I would say, ‘Here’s my problem or my struggle. How do we make the system help? What are our options?’ And then you can pick which option works for you.”
The implementation required VSP to think carefully about its workflows because so much of the platform could be customized. But the team did not have to force its hospital into a standard setup. Instinct EMR was configured around the way VSP wanted its patients, people, and records to move through the day.
That tailored setup did not create a complicated training burden after go-live. VSP regularly welcomes new employees, relief clinicians, and externs, many of whom have never used Instinct EMR. According to Clark, most only need a brief introduction before they can begin learning through everyday use.
“Most people figure it out within the week,” Dr. Clark said. “As far as getting into a system and being able to take a client from checking in to checking out, it’s a very simple process. We really haven’t found that we have to do a big onboarding with Instinct [EMR].”
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After go-live, VSP continued to shape Instinct EMR to its daily operations. The team uses the Status Board to track expected arrivals, outpatient appointments, hospitalized patients, and unfinished medical records. It even repurposed an unused boarding board as a holding area for patients who had gone home but still had samples, paperwork, or documentation to finalize. Each case remains visible until all tasks are complete.
Custom snippets have also changed how the internal medicine team handles documentation and client education. VSP can save trusted explanations for diagnoses such as Cushing’s disease, lymphoma, and pancreatitis, personalize them for the patient, and insert them directly into the record.
“[Instinct EMR] has really, really sped up our ability to get the information to the client without us having to start fresh on a blank Word document,” said Dr. Clark. “It allows personalization and it’s very quick. You just search for Cushing’s, lymphoma, and it brings up all the different ones that we’ve written and then you can input it into the record. I would say Snippets is one thing that we use every day and has also sped us up with paperwork efficiency quite a bit.”
Instinct EMR provides additional safeguards as care happens. Charges associated with treatments can automatically flow to the invoice, giving the team an opportunity to review, adjust, or remove them instead of accidentally leaving them behind. Technicians use the built-in Plumb’s integration to double-check prescriptions and doses, while Clark uses it to review possible drug interactions for medically complex patients.
The difference extends beyond the hospital. When an urgent care doctor contacts Clark about a patient she has never seen, she can open the record from home, including from her phone, quickly understand the case, and provide input. Information that once lived across separate documents and systems is available in one place.
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“I firmly believe it has sped up our paperwork dramatically,” Dr. Clark said. “I still spend a lot of time [on it], but I cannot imagine having to do the same kind of volume with the systems that I have used in the past. There’s just so much available at your fingertips, all in one screen. It’s very quick. It’s very easy. I think any specialty hospital that does anything like that, [Instinct is] a no-brainer in my opinion.”
Instinct helped VSP move beyond the patchwork of tools and time-consuming processes used during its startup years. Today, the practice can bring new users into the core workflow quickly, keep high-volume cases visible throughout the day, complete documentation more efficiently, and support specialty and urgent care across locations.
