The Heska integration within Shepherd streamlines the diagnostic workflow by allowing veterinary teams to create and manage lab orders directly from a patient's SOAP. It enables clinicians to order Heska lab services, cancel or edit existing diagnostics, and view all results centrally within the patient's record. The integration also ensures results are automatically synced and uploaded as documents to the patient’s file, maintaining a complete and accessible history. Learn more about Heska

Oliver helps veterinary teams reduce no-shows, improve client communication, and save staff time. With automated reminders, a digital waitlist, and smart scheduling tools, Oliver keeps your schedule full and your clients engaged—without adding more work for your team. Learn more about Oliver

Scout is a cloud-based dental charting and anesthesia management platform built for veterinary teams. It replaces paper forms with intuitive, real-time digital workflows that improve efficiency, reduce errors, and enhance patient safety during dental and surgical procedures. Scout automates all key calculations — including drug dosages, fluid rates, and CRIs — to streamline anesthesia planning and monitoring from start to finish. Learn more about Scout

If you’re tired of calling pharmacies, waiting on hold and faxing prescriptions, VetHub Rx is for you. Electronically prescribe to over 65,000 pharmacies in less than 30 seconds No more hold times. No more voicemails. No more wasted time. Take back your time with VetHub Rx. Learn more about VetHub Rx

You can now include employee affiliation directly on your IDEXX Reference Lab requisitions through Shepherd. No more need for stickers or creating requisitions through IDEXX VetConnect Plus. To enable this, navigate to Admin -> User and select their name under IDEXX Discount Clients to associate.

You can now send and receive images and videos directly in Shepherd’s Message Center, making it easier to assess a pet’s condition, track progress, and communicate clearly with clients - all without switching to email. Clients can send media files via MMS, which will appear inline in the Message Center as thumbnails. You can click to view images/videos in a larger format or open them in a new tab.

When you close and save a conversation to the medical record, the media files are saved alongside the message thread. They also appear in the Messaging tab of the client profile and in the patient’s history. Red badge notifications continue to appear when a new message - including MMS - is received.

For group accounts with shared messaging, a centralized Message Overview dashboard is now available to easily monitor usage across all locations.

When an appointment reminder is sent via email or SMS, the appointment status will now automatically update from 'Upcoming' to 'Pending Confirmation'. This provides a clear visual indicator that the reminder has been sent and that the appointment is now awaiting client confirmation. It also helps flag potential no-shows earlier, allowing teams to follow up proactively if needed.

Clients can now confirm appointments simply by replying to SMS appointment notifications, helping you reduce manual work and avoid missed appointment confirmations.

When a client replies to an appointment reminder with a valid confirmation, the appointment status will update automatically. This applies whether they’re confirming a single visit or selecting from multiple upcoming appointments.

The system guides clients through the process when more than one appointment is pending. Invalid or unclear responses will not update appointment status, and past or completed visits are never affected. This enhancement helps streamline your scheduling workflow and keeps your calendar accurate with less back-and-forth.

To enable this new Client Communication feature, navigate to Admin -> Client Communications -> Settings -> Enable Automatic 'Pending Confirmation' Status Update by SMS.

Once this feature is enabled, we recommend updating your SMS appointment notification templates to include a clear instruction for clients. For example:

Shepherd's activity logging now offers clearer visibility into why a product’s selling price has changed, particularly when those changes result from inventory actions. Log entries now include context when a price update is triggered by receiving a purchase order (including the PO number), manual cost adjustments on linked inventory items, inventory reconciliation or adjustments, or bulk inventory imports and edits.

These improvements make it easier to trace the origin of price updates, reduce confusion, and eliminate guesswork. Inventory and product logs are now more consistent, detailed, and ready for audit or review, offering a more transparent and trustworthy record of your price-related workflows.

You now have more control over the appearance of your appointment reminder emails with the addition of rich text formatting in Shepherd's email templates. The new editor supports bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, numbered and bulleted lists, paragraph indentation, and hyperlinks for easy click-throughs.

Formatting is preserved in both the preview and the emails sent to clients, and it works seamlessly with dynamic variables like CLIENT FIRST and PATIENT NAME. It also renders reliably across major email clients, helping you create clear, professional reminders that highlight the information that matters most.

In our last feature release, we introduced the Appointment Report to give you quick access to key scheduling data and insights. Now, we’ve enhanced the report with cancellation notes, so you can see the reasons behind canceled appointments at a glance. This added context helps you identify trends and make informed decisions about your scheduling workflows.

We’ve improved the Accounts Receivable Report to give you more precise control when filtering invoice data. The Outstanding Balance filter now displays only invoices with a positive remaining balance, while the Credit Balance filter shows those with a negative remaining balance. Additionally, the Invoice Status advanced filter now refines results based on the selected status, helping you drill into exactly what you need with greater accuracy.

We’ve made valuable updates to the Summary Report to make your experience faster, easier, and more efficient.

The redesigned layout offers improved organization and intuitive navigation, allowing you to find key metrics quickly and with less effort. We’ve also enhanced the download options, so you can export precisely the data you need.

To further streamline your reporting experience, the Production tab has been removed from the Summary Report. All production-related data is now available exclusively in the dedicated Production Report, ensuring you always access the most reliable, accurate information in the right place.

You can now view SMS conversation titles directly in the Patient History section of the Patient Profile. When a conversation includes a title, it appears in the Details column, giving your team clearer context at a glance. If no title is set, the column remains blank without a placeholder. This enhancement helps teams quickly identify and navigate message threads without needing to open each conversation individually.

We've made significant OpenAPI enhancements in this release to support automated imaging workflows, improved multi-site data sharing, expanded vitals capture capabilities, and better documentation delivery. These updates enhance external system connectivity while maintaining security and data integrity across your veterinary practice management workflows.

External integration partners can now write imaging data directly to the most recent active SOAP via API, enabling automated imaging documentation without manual intervention in Shepherd.

New Endpoint: POST /pav2/soap-imaging/write

Key Features:

Example Integration Source Header:

X-Integration-Source: Radimal

This enhancement streamlines radiology and imaging workflows by allowing external systems to automatically document imaging results directly into patient records, reducing manual data entry and improving clinical efficiency.

New OpenAPI endpoints provide comprehensive access to shared tasks and client discounts across multi-location practice groups.

New Endpoints:

Client Discount Capabilities:

Example Response Fields:

{

"amount": 30,

"byProductType": true,

"clientDiscountProductTypes": [

{

"amount": 30,

"productTypeId": "cf94012c-c34f-283c-dc2c-0aab6ca1085c"

}

]

}

These endpoints support sophisticated multi-location practice management by ensuring consistent task workflows and client discount policies across all clinic sites.

We've significantly expanded the vitals entry capabilities through OpenAPI to align with recent SOAP vitals updates, providing more comprehensive patient data capture.

Updated Endpoints:

New Vitals Options Supported:

Enhanced Filtering:

This update ensures that external monitoring devices and health systems can seamlessly integrate a broader range of patient vital information directly into Shepherd's clinical records, matching the enhanced vitals options available in the UI.

SOAP Imaging Write Protection:

Multi-Site Data Security:

Vitals Entry Consistency:

These updates particularly benefit: