From a Better Cat Hideaway to AI That Predicts Disease: Four Ideas Changing Veterinary Care

CareVet’s inaugural Clinical Outcomes Showcase honored four innovations that tackle very different veterinary problems, proving that changing patient outcomes doesn’t always require reinventing medicine. Sometimes it starts with noticing the thing that isn’t working.

Some of the best ideas in veterinary medicine don’t begin in a research laboratory or a Silicon Valley startup. They begin when someone working with patients every day notices a problem and wonders why everyone keeps doing things the same way.

A veterinary student looks at a hospitalized cat hiding in the back of its cage and wonders whether there’s a better way to provide security without sacrificing observation. A veterinary team gets tired of watching recommended urine and fecal tests disappear into the black hole of “bring us a sample later.” An exotic-animal veterinarian realizes that too many birds and reptiles only receive preventive medicine after something has already gone wrong.

And then there’s the increasingly sophisticated end of the spectrum: technology that looks through years of an animal’s medical history and attempts to identify disease risk before traditional clinical signs make that disease obvious.

Those four very different approaches took top honors at CareVet’s inaugural Clinical Outcomes Showcase, held in Nashville during August 2026. The competition brought together veterinary students, team members, veterinarians and animal health organizations to recognize ideas capable of improving outcomes for patients, clients and veterinary teams.

“What makes these winning ideas so exciting is how different they are—and yet they all start with the same question: How can we do better for the next patient?” said Dr. Kent Thornberry, CareVet president, co-founder and chief veterinary officer.

That question produced four answers that couldn't look much more different.

For Hospitalized Cats, Sometimes the Simple Idea Wins

Veterinary student Kristen Slagle of Oklahoma State University received the Rising Star Award for an idea that addresses one of the eternal challenges of feline medicine: cats want to hide, and veterinary professionals need to see them.

Anyone who has hospitalized a frightened cat understands the dilemma. Giving cats somewhere to retreat can reduce stress and provide a sense of security, but a completely enclosed hiding space can make it difficult for veterinary teams to continuously observe a sick patient.

Slagle's solution doesn't require sophisticated equipment. She proposed a clear hideaway box covered with perforated privacy film. From the cat's perspective, the enclosure provides the darkened, protected environment it wants. From the veterinary team's perspective, the design still allows staff to observe the patient.

It's an incredibly simple idea built around an important principle: reducing stress doesn't have to interfere with medical care.

The concept brings Fear Free principles into the practical realities of hospitalization, where veterinary teams have to balance emotional wellbeing with the need to monitor patients closely. It also illustrates something that became a theme among this year's winners. Innovation doesn't necessarily mean adding more technology. Sometimes it means redesigning something ordinary so it works better for the patient.

The Diagnostic Test That Never Makes It Back to the Hospital

The winner of the Veterinary Technician and Team Member Award tackled another problem veterinary professionals know extremely well.

The veterinarian recommends a urine sample. The client agrees. Everyone has the best intentions.

Then the sample never appears.

Sarah Wilmes of Binder Animal Hospital and her team decided to remove some of the friction between recommending a diagnostic test and actually receiving the specimen. They developed prepaid take-home sample collection kits containing the supplies and instructions owners need to collect urine, stool or both after their pet's appointment.

The idea may sound almost too simple to qualify as clinical innovation, until you look at what happened next.

In 2025 alone, more than 1,000 prepaid samples were returned to Binder Animal Hospital for analysis, according to CareVet. Those samples represented opportunities for earlier disease detection, more consistent monitoring of chronic conditions and better follow-through on diagnostic recommendations that might otherwise have been lost.

It's a useful reminder that a diagnostic test can have extraordinary sensitivity and specificity and still provide absolutely no clinical value if the sample never gets collected.

By making the process easier for owners, Wilmes and her team didn't invent a new diagnostic test. They improved the likelihood that existing diagnostics would actually happen.

Exotic Pets Deserve Preventive Medicine, Too

Veterinary medicine has become much better at convincing dog and cat owners to think preventively. Annual examinations, vaccinations, parasite prevention, dental care, nutrition and screening diagnostics have become familiar parts of companion animal medicine.

Exotic pets often have a very different experience.

Birds, reptiles, aquatic animals and small mammals frequently arrive at veterinary hospitals because something is already wrong. Preventive care can be overlooked, and owners may not realize that husbandry, nutrition and environmental conditions can have enormous effects on the health of these species.

Dr. Samantha Gruenwald of Frankenmuth-Birch Run Veterinary Hospital, winner of CareVet's Veterinarian Award, decided that every exotic-animal encounter should also become an opportunity for preventive medicine.

Under her approach, an exotic patient arriving for illness, grooming or another concern doesn't receive care limited only to the reason for the appointment. The visit also includes evaluation of species-specific husbandry, nutrition, preventive health risks and appropriate screening, along with individualized owner education.

That means the veterinarian isn't simply treating today's problem. The team is looking for tomorrow's.

Routine weight and body-condition monitoring, nutritional counseling and earlier diagnostic screening have already helped the hospital identify disease sooner and reduce recurring husbandry-related conditions, according to CareVet.

The impact has even traveled beyond the examination room. After Gruenwald conducted educational outreach in her community, a local pet store transitioned its budgies and parakeets to pelleted diets, potentially helping new owners start with better nutritional practices before those birds ever become veterinary patients.

That's preventive medicine working exactly the way it's supposed to.

What If the Medical Record Could Warn You About Disease Years Earlier?

The fourth winner represents the opposite end of the technological spectrum.

Pointer Health received the Veterinary Corporation and Group Award for a prognostic medicine platform designed to use information already sitting inside veterinary medical records to identify patients with elevated disease risk before those conditions would ordinarily be recognized clinically.

The platform uses predictive and causal modeling to analyze a patient's longitudinal medical history and generate individualized risk assessments across more than 170 conditions. Importantly, it doesn't require another blood draw, piece of equipment or diagnostic procedure to perform that initial analysis. It looks for meaningful patterns in information the veterinary team has already collected.

Rather than simply comparing a patient with a broad population average, the system evaluates changes relative to that individual animal's own history and baseline.

The goal is to give veterinarians an earlier indication that a particular patient may warrant closer attention, additional screening, lifestyle changes or preventive intervention.

In a 2025 practice pilot, hospitals using the platform saw increased participation in bloodwork, wellness testing, urinalysis and dental prophylaxis, according to CareVet. That suggests personalized risk information may do something veterinarians have struggled with for decades: make an invisible future health risk feel relevant enough for an owner to act on today.

It's also part of a much larger shift underway in veterinary medicine. For generations, much of veterinary care has been reactive. An animal develops symptoms, the owner recognizes them, the patient arrives at the hospital and the veterinary team begins figuring out what happened.

Increasingly, technology is asking whether some of that sequence can be reversed.

If the data already contained in a patient's medical record can identify meaningful changes before obvious clinical disease develops, veterinary medicine may be able to intervene earlier rather than waiting for the patient to become sick enough for someone to notice.

Four Innovations With Almost Nothing—and Everything—in Common

Put these four winning ideas next to each other and they barely appear to belong in the same competition.

One involves privacy film and a cat hiding box. Another involves prepaid sample containers. A third changes the way veterinarians approach wellness care for exotic animals. The fourth uses sophisticated predictive modeling to look for disease risk across more than 170 conditions.

But that's exactly what makes the Clinical Outcomes Showcase interesting.

Veterinary innovation has become almost synonymous with technology, particularly as artificial intelligence, wearables, remote monitoring and increasingly sophisticated diagnostics move into animal health. Those developments are exciting, but they can create the impression that meaningful progress requires software engineers, venture capital and a very expensive booth at a veterinary conference.

These winners tell a different story.

Sometimes the obstacle standing between a patient and better medicine is simply that nobody brought the urine sample back.

Sometimes it's that a bird owner doesn't know what appropriate nutrition looks like.

Sometimes it's that a hospitalized cat is terrified.

And sometimes the answer really is an algorithm capable of finding something inside years of medical data that the human eye would struggle to see.

“The goal of this Showcase was never to suggest there is only one definition of innovation,” Thornberry said. “It was to create a place where people across veterinary medicine could share what they are learning, challenge the way things have always been done and help the rest of the profession see what might be possible.”

That may be the biggest lesson from CareVet's first group of winners.

Better veterinary medicine doesn't always begin with a breakthrough. Sometimes it begins with a veterinary student, technician or doctor looking at an everyday problem and asking a deceptively simple question:

Why are we still doing it this way?

CareVet says it plans to continue the Clinical Outcomes Showcase, providing veterinary professionals, students and organizations with an ongoing opportunity to share ideas that could improve patient care and clinical outcomes.

If its inaugural winners are any indication, the next big idea in veterinary medicine could come from almost anywhere.

Including the person standing next to you in the treatment room.

Source: CareVet, August 17, 2026. Winner information, program results and quotes from Dr. Kent Thornberry were provided by CareVet in announcing the inaugural Clinical Outcomes Showcase winners.