Veterinary clinics fax referral records because their practice management systems cannot talk to each other

Your dog needs to see a veterinary cardiologist. Your primary vet has 3 years of records — bloodwork, X-rays, medication history, vaccine records. To refer you, they print the records, fax them (yes, fax) to the specialist, or burn them to a CD. The specialist receives 30 pages of faxed records with illegible handwriting, missing lab values, and no imaging (because you cannot fax an X-ray at diagnostic quality). At the specialist appointment, they re-run $400 worth of bloodwork and X-rays because the faxed records are incomplete. So what? Pet owners pay for duplicate diagnostics at every referral — $200-600 per specialist visit in unnecessary repeat tests. The records that justify the referral (trending lab values, response to previous treatments) are lost in the fax. The specialist makes decisions with incomplete history. In veterinary oncology, this means chemotherapy dosing decisions made without knowing the patient's full drug reaction history. An agent that could extract records from one practice management system (Cornerstone, AVImark, eVetPractice) and format them for import into another would eliminate the fax-and-retest cycle. Why doesn't this agent exist? The veterinary industry has no equivalent of HL7 FHIR (the healthcare interoperability standard). Each practice management system (there are 20+) stores data in proprietary formats with no export API. IDEXX owns Cornerstone and the dominant lab equipment — they have no incentive to make records portable because lock-in drives lab revenue. The veterinary industry is 15 years behind human healthcare in interoperability.