Why veterinary software should be open

Walk into any veterinary clinic and almost everything follows a standard. Drugs have monographs. Labs report against reference ranges. Anesthesia has protocols. Then you get to the software that ties it all together, the practice management system, and the standards disappear. Your data lives in a format only the vendor can read. The API, if there is one, is locked behind a partnership team. And the bill arrives every month whether the software got better or not.

Closed software is a tax on the whole industry

When the system of record is closed, every good idea downstream gets harder. A reminder tool has to beg for integration access. An AI scribe can read but not write. A new analytics product can't get the data out. The clinic that wants to switch finds out their five years of records are effectively hostage. None of this is about bad people. It's about incentives. A closed PIMS makes more money the harder it is to leave.

The best software for veterinary medicine should be built with the veterinary community, not sold to it.

What open changes

• Your data is yours. Full export, any time, in a format you can read. No lock-in, no exit fee.
• Anyone can build on it. A documented, read-write API means the next great tool doesn't need anyone's permission.
• The roadmap follows real clinics, not a sales quota. Features ship because a practice needed them.
• Trust is inspectable. The code is public. You can see exactly what happens to a patient record.

OpenVPM is our attempt to prove this can exist and be good: not a stripped-down toy, but a modern PIMS with a real API that a clinic could actually run. It's open source (AGPLv3) and always will be.

We don't think we have all the answers. We think the answers come faster in the open. If you run a clinic, build in this space, or just have opinions about how it should work, we want them. The harder the better.