Digitizing veterinary records didn't make them structured

Over ten years ago, when I worked at a dog daycare, vets would fax over vaccination records and we'd copy the dates into our own system by hand. It was a slow and tedious process. I would have hoped that by now, ten years later, that part of the problem would be solved.

It mostly is. But it still has a long way to go.

U.S. states are digitizing

2026 is a real inflection point for veterinary paperwork. The document at the center of all this is called a Certificate of Veterinary Inspection, or CVI, which is the health certificate a vet issues to confirm an animal is fit to travel or cross state lines.

Minnesota has set two deadlines for requiring electronic CVIs instead of paper: export certificates needed to go electronic by January 1, 2026, and import certificates follow by July 1, 2026. Texas is on a similar phased timeline, moving from no longer accepting paper CVIs for imports, to no longer selling paper CVIs at all, to a full electronic-only requirement by January 1, 2027. Ohio finalized its own switch to an electronic-only system for both in-state and interstate certificates starting this January.

The old paper form a lot of states relied on, called the APHIS 7001, is getting phased out specifically because it's too easy to forge and too hard to verify. As of this May, a growing number of states no longer accept it for small animal movement at all. States are replacing it with proper electronic systems that have unique identifiers and an actual audit trail.

Digital doesn't mean structured

Here's the issue that doesn't get fixed by digitization. An electronic health certificate is a real improvement over a fax, but it's also still, almost always, a PDF.

A PDF is a picture of a document that happens to be searchable. It's not data. All of the critical information, the vaccine name, the date administered, the expiration, the vet's license number, is still locked inside a layout that was designed to be read by a person, not parsed by a system. Whatever platform downstream needs that information still has to pull it back out, and pulling structured meaning out of a document designed for human eyes has exactly the same problem whether that document arrived by fax in 2016 or got exported from a digital portal in 2026.

The format changed. The actual problem, getting from "a document a person can read" to "data a system can use," hasn't moved at all. A 2026 study in PLOS Digital Health put it plainly: the use of veterinary records for research and downstream applications is consistently "limited by interoperability challenges including inconsistent data formats and data siloing." That's the structural problem, and it predates the fax.

And the formats didn't converge, they multiplied

The harder part is that this transition isn't happening all at once, in one direction, with one industry winner. Veterinary medicine has no equivalent to the HL7 or FHIR interoperability standards that human healthcare runs on. Each practice management system historically defined its own data structures, meaning "what made sense to one was complete gobbledegook to another." Some states have their own electronic systems, some clinics use GlobalVetLink, and some still take paper because their state hasn't mandated otherwise yet. Boarding platforms, insurers, and shelters are each receiving documents from whichever combination of these a clinic happens to use, plus years of backlog still sitting in old formats, plus the occasional fax that still shows up.

So instead of one mess converging into one clean format, you get many different clean formats arriving at once, each internally tidy and mutually unreadable, sitting alongside whatever paper and scans haven't worked their way out of the system yet. For pet service providers trying to make sense of records coming in from a hundred different clinics across a dozen states, that's not obviously easier than the fax era. It's just a different type of fragmentation.

This is the problem that remains

This isn't an argument against the digitization push. Certificates with unique identifiers and a real audit trail are strictly better than a form anyone can download and forge. The states doing this are solving a real fraud and verification problem.

But solving the verification problem and solving the structure problem are two different jobs, and digitizing a certificate only finishes the first one. The second job, turning whatever shows up, in whatever format the document happens to be in this year, into clean data a platform can actually build on, is the same job it's always been. It's the one we built Pawssier to do, and it's not going away just because the paperwork finally caught up to the digital world.