The equine veterinary profession is losing practitioners faster than it can replace them.
The AAEP Commission on Equine Veterinary Sustainability, formed in 2022 and completed in 2024, put numbers to what equine veterinarians have been feeling for years. Only 1.3% of new veterinary graduates enter equine practice directly. Within five years, half of all equine veterinarians leave for small animal practice or quit the profession entirely.
These are not projections. They are the current state of equine veterinary medicine.
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
The Commission's findings paint a picture of a profession under structural pressure from multiple directions.
Workforce pipeline: With only 1.3% of graduates choosing equine practice, the profession is not replacing the veterinarians it loses. The pipeline is thin before it even begins.
Retention failure: The 50% five-year attrition rate means half of the equine veterinarians who do enter the field will not stay. The primary drivers are burnout, compensation gaps, and the unsustainable demands of running a practice with little or no support.
Emergency coverage without compensation: 42% of equine veterinarians make no additional money from emergency visits, despite providing around-the-clock coverage. The expectation of 24/7 availability without corresponding pay is a structural problem, not an individual one.
Solo practice reality: According to the AAEP's own membership data, 35% of equine veterinarians practice solo. 16% operate with no staff at all. That means one in six equine veterinarians is the clinician, the receptionist, the billing department, and the record-keeper simultaneously.
What the Commission Recommends
The AAEP Commission identified five focus areas for improving equine veterinary sustainability: compensation strategies, emergency coverage models, practice culture, internship structures, and student development.
Within those focus areas, two technology-specific recommendations stand out.
First, the Commission specifically recommends practice management software that auto-generates invoices from clinical records. This is not a general suggestion about using technology. It is a specific capability recommendation: the software should connect documentation directly to billing so that the act of recording clinical work simultaneously creates the invoice.
Second, the Commission advocates for telehealth appointments and centralized scheduling as tools to improve practice sustainability. For solo and small-team equine practices, the ability to manage appointments from any device and offer remote consultations reduces the physical and administrative burden that drives burnout.
Why This Matters More for Equine Than Any Other Specialty
Every veterinary specialty faces administrative challenges. But equine practice has characteristics that make the burden uniquely heavy.
Equine veterinarians work in the field. They drive between barns, treat patients in paddocks, and manage records from the cab of a truck. There is no front desk. There is no office manager. The veterinarian is the entire operation.
Horses have multiple owners. A single patient might have an owner, a trainer, a syndicate, and a farm manager, each with different billing relationships. Generic veterinary software was not designed for this complexity.
Barn visits involve batch services. A single stop might include vaccinations for 15 horses, Coggins tests for 8, and dental floats for 3, all requiring separate invoices to different owners. Without purpose-built equine practice management software, this means hours of manual data entry after a full day of clinical work.
Travel scheduling adds another layer. An ambulatory equine vet's day is a logistics problem: which barns to visit in what order, how to minimize drive time while maximizing patient coverage, and how to handle the emergency call that disrupts the entire route.
These are not edge cases. They are the daily reality of equine practice. And they are exactly why the administrative burden falls so heavily on equine veterinarians compared to their small animal counterparts.
What "Auto-Generate Invoices from Clinical Records" Actually Looks Like
The Commission's recommendation for PMS that auto-generates invoices from clinical records describes a specific workflow: the veterinarian documents clinical work, and the software creates the corresponding invoice automatically.
In practice, this means a veterinarian finishes a lameness exam, dictates a SOAP note, and the system generates an invoice that includes the exam fee, any diagnostics performed, and medications dispensed. No separate billing step. No transcribing from paper notes to a billing system at the end of the day. No lost revenue from services that were performed but never invoiced.
For solo practitioners, this is not a convenience feature. It is the difference between capturing revenue and losing it. When you are the only person in the practice, every task you skip or defer has a direct financial cost. The AAEP Commission recognized this by making it a specific recommendation rather than a general suggestion about technology adoption.
Centralized Scheduling and Telehealth
The Commission's second technology recommendation, centralized scheduling and telehealth, addresses the other half of the sustainability equation: time.
Centralized scheduling means a single calendar that works across providers, locations, and devices. For multi-vet practices, it eliminates the coordination overhead of managing separate schedules. For solo practitioners, it means clients can book appointments without the back-and-forth phone calls that consume hours every week.
Telehealth extends this further. Not every follow-up requires a barn visit. Post-surgical checks, medication adjustments, and wound monitoring can often happen through a video consultation, saving drive time and creating billable appointments that would otherwise go unscheduled.
Both capabilities reduce the total hours required to run a practice without reducing the quality of care delivered. That is the core sustainability equation the Commission is trying to solve.
This Is Not a Feature Discussion
When the leading professional body for equine veterinary medicine publishes a commission report that specifically names practice management software capabilities as part of the solution to a workforce crisis, the conversation has moved past feature comparisons.
The equine veterinary profession is losing half its practitioners within five years. The ones who stay are working 56-hour weeks with little or no support staff. The Commission has identified what needs to change, and technology that eliminates administrative overhead is part of that change.
The question for practice owners is no longer whether to invest in modern practice management software. It is whether the software they use actually delivers the specific capabilities the Commission recommends: auto-invoicing from clinical records, centralized scheduling, and tools that work in the field, not just in the office.
StableTrack was built to deliver exactly these capabilities for equine practices. Its AI assistant generates SOAP notes from voice dictation, automatically creates invoices from clinical documentation, and manages scheduling from any device. Barn Operations handles batch services and multi-owner billing. Everything works offline and syncs when connectivity returns.
The AAEP Commission defined what equine practice management software needs to do. StableTrack already does it.
Sources: AAEP Commission on Equine Veterinary Sustainability (2024), AAEP Equine Veterinary Sustainability Initiative