Dr. MacNeill wishes he'd switched five years sooner
“If you want a job, you work in a bank. If you want a career, you join the Army. If you want a way of life, you become a veterinarian. I don’t have a secretary when people come through the door. I’m the one entering all the information into the software, so I needed something to help me become more efficient.” — Dr. Brad MacNeill, McKean County Animal Hospital
Dr. Brad MacNeill has owned his Bradford, Pennsylvania practice since 1985. Three full-time staff, two part-time, and a deliberate decision to stay small. In his words: “We’re short on fluff, but long on substance. Our clients know exactly who they’ll see when they come in, and they trust me to give them quality care for their hard-earned money.”
He also calls himself an old-school doc. He went to Cornell when computers were just coming into vogue, and he’ll tell you he’s not computer savvy. He knows how his profession thinks about change: veterinarians are “really busy and don’t like to change, especially if something is working.”
His software wasn’t working. He was staying late, missing dinner, and carrying medical records in a state with some of the strictest documentation requirements in the country.
What made him look
Pennsylvania was the pressure point.
“Pennsylvania is one of the toughest states as far as medical records are concerned, which is critical for a veterinarian. My previous software was cumbersome and confusing,” Dr. MacNeill says. His read on why: it wasn’t built by people who practice. “Veterinarians did not make it, and I could see the difference with Shepherd when I began to look into other software programs.”
That difference is not an accident of one founder’s origin story. Shepherd was started by a practicing veterinarian who spent tens of thousands of dollars on software that didn’t fit, and it’s still built that way. Veterinary experience runs across the team, a Director of Veterinary Medicine sits on staff, and the product roadmap is set by what practitioners tell us breaks in a real shift.
Dr. MacNeill saw it immediately. “I’ll be honest. I didn’t look around too much. I looked at a couple of things that were important to me, namely medical recordkeeping, and I looked at Shepherd and made a quick decision. The thing that really caught my eye was that Shepherd’s CEO set out to create her own software that met her needs after spending tens of thousands of dollars on other programs. I saw the sensibility and practicality of doing it that way.”
What the switch took
Here’s the part most practices want to hear, because it’s the part that keeps them where they are.
The heavy lift was data, not training. “The hardest thing that was fairly time-consuming to get up and running was the inventory and service transfer to the new software,” Dr. MacNeill says.
The nerves were real and they were temporary. “I was nervous the first month or so since I’m not that computer savvy, but repetition breeds familiarity. Now, it’s like water running off a duck’s back.”
That is what we mean by Second Nature Software™. Not that it’s easy on day one, but that it stops being something you think about.
There were growing pains. His team has no complaints.
If you’re weighing a switch and the thing stopping you is your team, your inventory, or your own comfort with new software, that’s the honest version of what you’re signing up for. A hard stretch on data. A month of unfamiliar. Then it’s ordinary.
What changed
Dr. MacNeill completes medical records after the appointment instead of during it. “I’m not typing in the exam room. I’m looking the client in the eye and performing my physical exam.”
He moved off paper at the same time, onto templated electronic records. Everyone leaves at 6 p.m. now.
He points to the everyday things when asked what he likes: “They made everything simple, from changing prices and entering medical records to educating clients and creating itemized invoices.”
And the reason any of it matters:
“I didn’t get to see my four daughters growing up, and one of my granddaughters lives in Chicago. But my other granddaughter lives on my way home, and I will not miss watching this granddaughter grow up as I did with my own kids.”
His only regret is timing. He wishes he’d done it five years earlier.
See it on your own workflow
If your software is the reason you’re still at the clinic after hours, see what a system built around real clinical flow looks like on your cases, your records, and your state’s requirements.
