Instinct Science launches Attending, an AI clinical assistant for vets
Instinct Science, the Philadelphia-based veterinary technology company behind Instinct EMR and Plumb's Veterinary Drugs, has announced Attending, a clinical AI assistant designed exclusively for veterinary professionals. The product entered an invitation-only research preview several months ago and is now being used daily across hundreds of clinicians at leading centres in the United States.
The tool is positioned to answer plain-language clinical queries with specialty-level responses, citing peer-reviewed sources including Plumb's Veterinary Drugs, Standards of Care, and Clinician's Brief. Crucially, the company says dosing and other safety-critical information is retrieved directly from Plumb's rather than generated by the underlying language model, a design choice intended to reduce hallucination risk in high-stakes clinical settings. Every response surfaces inline citations that can be verified with a single tap.
Early deployment and clinical feedback
Attending has been piloted at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Centre in New York, described by the company as the largest veterinary teaching environment in the world. Dennis Slade, head of internal medicine at the centre, said the tool had "proved to be a useful resource for complex cases, questions, and for both personal learning and teaching," adding that clinical accuracy and peer-reviewed grounding were non-negotiable requirements that Attending met.
Caleb Frankel, founder, CEO, and a practising emergency veterinarian, framed the product around the practical pressures of clinical shifts: "All veterinarians experience high-pressure moments, such as complex cases or drug questions at 2 a.m. when they are the only doctor in the practice. Attending was built for these times."
The product is currently invitation-only. Instinct Science said it plans to make Attending available as a standalone subscription and as an embedded feature within its Instinct EMR and ScribbleVet workflow tools in the coming months. The company did not disclose pricing, the number of enrolled preview users, or the specific large language model infrastructure underpinning the product.
Market context and competitive landscape
Veterinary-specific AI tooling is an emerging but rapidly crowding segment within animal health technology. General-purpose AI assistants such as those built on GPT-4-class models have already found their way into informal clinical use across both human and veterinary medicine, raising concerns among professional bodies about hallucinated dosing information and the absence of species-specific training data. Instinct Science's decision to constrain Attending's drug-dosing outputs to retrieval from Plumb's, a reference trusted across the profession for decades, is a direct response to those concerns.
On the human medicine side, companies including Nuance, Abridge, and Ambience Healthcare have made significant inroads with AI-assisted clinical documentation and decision support, attracting substantial venture backing. The veterinary sector has lagged but is attracting growing interest: the global veterinary software market is expanding as corporate consolidation of veterinary practices drives demand for scalable, integrated technology platforms. Instinct Science, which says it serves more than 300,000 veterinary professionals worldwide, is well placed to leverage its existing content library as a differentiated data moat against newer entrants without proprietary clinical content.
The key near-term milestones for the company will be the commercial availability timeline, integration depth within its EMR workflow, and any peer-reviewed validation studies from the Schwarzman AMC pilot that could support broader adoption among institutional customers.