Answering all your Petabyte Consortium questions
We’re so excited about the launch of our Petabyte Consortium and we’d love for as many of you as possible to get involved. So, we’re answering some of the FAQs to help get you on board!
Q: What exactly is a consortium? And how does it benefit veterinarians and veterinary groups?
A: A consortium is a technique often implemented by major software companies, like Microsoft and Apple, to help gauge what the industry wants. Panels are put together consisting of leading customers and clients to get them directly involved in driving the future of the software.
Since many current PIMS are not the primary focus of their parent company, there’s never been a push to identify (or meet) veterinary software needs. But rhapsody’s focus is entirely on creating exceptional veterinary software. Which means giving industry clients a strong voice is very important to us.
Enter the Petabyte Consortium; a collaborative way to help fix the industry with the technology that powers it. With the Petabyte Consortium we’re hoping to implement some structure into how the veterinary community helps shape the next generation of our software.
Together, we want to address some of the high-level issues, such as best practices, practice management, and day-to-day workflows. Working with the veterinary community will help us identify the problems so we can solve them as we build.
Q: Why are we launching the Petabyte Consortium and what does that mean for our company?
A: We are huge believers that the veterinary industry needs world-class software that lifts up veterinary teams and helps them make more effective choices that lead to better lives.
By doing this through the Petabyte Consortium, we’re able to bring in a spectrum of leading industry voices, from very small to very large hospitals and mega groups. Our hope is that this will drive collaboration that will, as a result, better reflect industry needs in the software we build.
Q: How does the Petabyte Consortium benefit veterinary professionals and help independent practices, grow and remain independent?
A: Single practices still make up the majority of the veterinary community, so we need to make sure that every voice is heard. With the Petabyte Consortium, we’re working towards building an ecosystem that can move many of these problems forward into solutions that reach, not just groups, but the single practices as well. So that rhapsody’s features actually help improve the way veterinary teams practice medicine leading to better medical outcomes, better workflows, better use of staff, and overall efficiency.
Additionally, we can empower practices with clean data for better interpretation of what’s been happening within the practice, from how they’re practicing medicine to how they’re generating revenue.
Q: If a practice is interested in transitioning to rhapsody, what does that process look like?
A: In general, we’re getting better and faster with the migration process. Using The Matcher, we can transform what people have in their current systems into clean, standardized data, within a very short period of time.
That migration process includes cleaning up and formatting price code lists, vitals, diagnostics, and just the general junk that’s been sitting in these systems for years. We’re taking it and turning it into something that’s far more meaningful.
Q: What is The Matcher and how does it make the migration process, and rhapsody in general, so unique?
A: When we started rhapsody, one of biggest concerns was helping practices modernize. Many of our clients had been on the same PIMS for decades, resulting in a lot of accumulated data.
Rather than forcing clients to reckon with the concept of starting over, we developed technology that would clean and standardize their data so practices can actually use it to move their business forward. The Matcher does all that and accounts for historical capturing, multiple entries, typos, and other human errors. The result is beautiful and actionable information quickly accessible at your fingertips.
Q: As we bring on more partners into this Consortium, how does that change (if at all), who owns rhapsody? And, who owns the data?
A: The Consortium doesn’t change who owns rhapsody or data ownership.
We have incredibly tight contracts with our customers that are very restrictive as to what we do with data.
Everybody who’s on the platform owns their own data.
And absolutely no data is shared with anyone. We don’t ever share the data from one customer to another customer. Nor do we share customer data with our investors or partners.
Our tech team comes from a very high data security world, and we implement the same approach here. All data is very secure, held very tightly, locked, and completely separated across customers.
Q: Who can join the Consortium? How do you choose your partners?
A: In general, we’re looking for two types of partners.
Industry players
Partners who want to collaborate with us through their own products. There are a ton of amazing products in the veterinary space (from staffing to customer acquisition). We’re looking to give those companies the opportunity to contribute to the platform, not just via API, but to be directly plugged into the software with a direct connection to customers. The more software players involved in the rhapsody ecosystem, the more the platform becomes a universal space for the veterinary industry to work together.
Platform influencers
Partners who are forward-thinking, indexing for innovation, and really focusing on how to leverage technology to change the industry and improve the lives of veterinary teams.
Overall, we’re looking for anyone curious and determined to modernize this industry. We want companies, groups, and practices of different sizes and backgrounds to help make sure the platforms we create benefits the entire veterinary community. So please reach out to us. We’re happy to talk to every person interested in lifting up this industry.
Q: Who are some of your current partners?
A: We’ve got a number of groups and hospitals joining the consortium, including NVA and easyvet, with a couple more announcements coming soon.
Partnering through the Petabyte Consortium also allows us to stay an independent company so that our platforms are available to the entire veterinary industry (and not just to the practices within one company).
Q: How is NVA involved and what does that mean for rhapsody users?
A: NVA came in as an investor and we’re very excited to have them along for the ride, in addition to several other partners to be announced soon. NVA represents a very particular niche in the industry as a mega group that is forward-thinking and determined to make every NVA clinic a fantastic place to be.
And, so, we can’t wait to leverage the years of experience that they have running clinics, running clinics at scale, and bringing together people from across the world into their network. It’s an amazing base of knowledge, experience, and ideas which we can implement into building effective platforms that help drive the best workflows and best set of features imaginable.
Q: What new and exciting improvements are headed our way?
A: A major issue in the veterinary industry is that often, software is built in isolation, forcing practices to mix and match a bunch of random software together just to sort of, kind of, get features that don’t really work that well together.
We wanted to build a platform that accounts for all workflows and has every necessary feature built right in, creating seamless integration within the platform and an effective connection between the practice and the pet parent.
One of our newer products is Boop, a client communication platform that’s built right into rhapsody. Boop facilitates real-time, two-way communication between pet parents and the vet team. A recently launched Boop feature is task management which allows practices to assign tasks to pet parents via the client-facing app, helping pet parents manage their pet’s health better and improving client compliance along the way.
Everything we build is with the intention to solve problems for practices and clients so every pet gets better care.
Q: What do you mean by voice of the customer? How important is it for the voice of the customer to be the guiding light for everything you do?
A: Listening to our clients and prospective clients tell us how they conduct business and medicine; their pain points and frustrations with their current platform; and how they want their software to make things more efficient.
All that input helps dictate what we build. With the Petabyte Consortium, we hope to maximize the voice of the customer so that it is reflected in the evolution of our technology and the entire industry.
How can I join?
Let's start with a chat.
Our head of sales, Katie Huneke is here to answer any of your questions.
Listen to the Q&A session
This blog was adapted from the Q&A session we hosted a couple weeks ago. Hear our team answer your questions live!