Owner Reported Outcomes Could Change How You Practice

You know the conversation. The client sits across from you three weeks after starting treatment, and you ask how things are going. They say "better, I think?" or "about the same, maybe?" or "hard to tell."

You look at the lab work. Clinically, the numbers are improving. But the owner isn't sure they see a difference in their pet's quality of life. So is the treatment working or not?

Until now, you've been navigating this gap with clinical judgment, follow-up questions, and hoping you're all talking about the same thing when you say "improvement." Mars Veterinary Health's 2025 Science Impact Report introduces something that could actually help: rigorously validated Owner Reported Outcomes, or OROs.

What OROs Actually Are

Owner Reported Outcomes are standardized, validated instruments that systematically incorporate the pet owner's perspective into clinical care and veterinary trials. Think of them as the veterinary equivalent of patient-reported outcomes in human medicine, except we've been practicing without them for basically forever.

Here's why this matters: We measure a lot of things in veterinary medicine. We measure white blood cell counts, joint range of motion, tumor size, kidney values, heart murmur grades. We're good at measuring objective clinical parameters.

But we're not great at measuring the things owners care about most: Is my dog's pain actually better? Is my cat enjoying life more? Can my pet do the activities they love? Is their appetite improving in a way that matters for daily life?

OROs give us validated tools to measure those things consistently. Not through vague "how are things going?" questions, but through specific, standardized assessments that can be compared across patients, practices, and time.

Why This Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds

If you've ever struggled to demonstrate treatment value to a skeptical owner, OROs could be your new best friend. Objective measurements of subjective experiences.

"Three weeks ago, you rated Max's mobility at 4 out of 10. Today you're rating it at 7 out of 10. That's consistent with the improvements we're seeing clinically, and it tells us the treatment is working in ways that matter for Max's daily life."

That's a different conversation than "the joint fluid analysis shows reduced inflammation" followed by the owner saying "but he still seems uncomfortable."

For clinical trials, OROs are even more important. We've been conducting veterinary research without consistently measuring outcomes from the owner's perspective. That's a massive gap. Treatment might be clinically successful but practically unsuccessful if it doesn't improve the pet's life in ways owners can observe.

OROs provide the first globally standardized way to assess pet well-being and treatment response from the perspective of the people who live with these animals 24/7. That's not a small methodological improvement. That's a fundamental shift in how we measure success.

What This Means for Your Practice

Right now, OROs are being validated and implemented primarily within Mars Veterinary Health's network. But here's the thing about standardized, validated instruments: once they exist, they tend to spread. Human medicine's patient-reported outcomes didn't stay confined to the research hospitals that developed them.

If OROs prove valuable (and they almost certainly will), you'll start seeing them referenced in veterinary journals, integrated into clinical trials, and eventually available as tools you can use in your own practice.

The 2025 Science Impact Report positions this as "a groundbreaking initiative" and "marking a significant step toward globally standardized assessment of pet well-being and treatment response." That language matters. Mars isn't just developing internal tools. They're developing something they intend to become the standard across veterinary medicine.

The Practical Application

Imagine this scenario: A client is considering orthopedic surgery for their dog with severe osteoarthritis. They're hesitant about putting their 11-year-old Labrador through a major procedure. You can show them ORO data from similar cases showing that 78% of owners reported significant improvements in their dog's quality of life within six weeks post-surgery, with specific metrics on mobility, pain behaviors, and activity levels.

Or a cat owner is debating whether to continue chemotherapy for lymphoma. You can discuss not just survival times and remission rates, but validated owner-reported measures of their cat's appetite, energy, social interaction, and overall quality of life during treatment.

These conversations already happen. OROs just make them more precise, more comparable, and more evidence-based.

The Bigger Picture

Mars Veterinary Health sees millions of pets annually across its global network. That scale allows for ORO validation across diverse populations, multiple countries, and different practice settings. That's legitimately valuable for the profession, regardless of how you feel about corporate consolidation.

We need better ways to measure treatment success from the perspective of the people paying for care and living with the outcomes. OROs aren't a perfect solution (no measurement tool is), but they're a significant improvement over "how do you think your pet is doing?"

The full Science Impact Report is at marsveterinary.com/veterinary-science/reports/2025. The ORO section deserves your attention, especially if you practice in areas where subjective owner assessment is critical: pain management, behavioral medicine, chronic disease management, oncology, rehabilitation.

This could change how you document treatment success, how you communicate with clients, and how you make clinical decisions. That's worth paying attention to.

The Bottom Line

For years, we've been asking clients "how's your pet doing?" and hoping their answer aligns with what we're seeing clinically. Now we have validated instruments to measure owner perspective systematically.

That's not revolutionary in a flashy way. But it might be revolutionary in the way that actually matters: making us better at assessing treatment success from the perspective of the humans who love these animals.

And that's been missing from veterinary medicine for too long.