The owner responded on my same review but on Google, and I think it's important to answer every…read morepoint they made.
Firstly, I never made the argument in my review that we were "charged without knowledge or authorization." We simply disagree with the clinic's pricing but that was not understood, and that's fine. I think it's important to understand that consenting to the price should never be interpreted as being content with the price. We paid because we loved Coco and because the diagnostics and treatments needed to be done, not because we were happy with what we were being charged.
Secondly, it was said, "unless another clinic is quoting the exact same services, the totals are simply not comparable." Well, let's compare them to another clinic in Pinecrest.
The other clinic we went to charged us $291 for bloodwork, urinalysis, fecal testing (no AI interpretation), and a physical examination. At this Pinecrest clinic, they did not do radiographic analysis on Coco. On the other hand, Dolly's Animal Clinic labs consisted of bloodwork, urinalysis, fecal testing (with AI interpretation), radiographic views (with AI interpretation and radiology specialist interpretation), and a physical examination for a total of $1,328.
Now, whether Coco needed to have x-rays done is at the discretion of the vet. However, please be mindful that the $675.75 of x-rays amounted to no new information about Coco. The findings were the same, if not similar, as to what was shown and vocalized from the IDEXX analysis (bloodwork, urinalysis, and fecal testing) and physical examination.
I recommend, before a vet recommends X-rays, reading an article about cat X-rays and whether or not they're necessary for your cat because you really don't know if your vet has you or your pet's best interests at heart.
I suggest reading this article by petMD: https://www.petmd.com/cat/procedure/cat-x-rays. Especially ask yourself if you think your cat's situation is an emergency and needs an immediate interpretation from a radiologist, costing you a grand fee, or if you think it's reasonable to seek an additional interpretation from AI if there is already a radiologist looking at the x-rays.
At the end of the day, without taking radiographs into consideration, Dollys' charged us $652.25 for the exact same IDEXX labs, whereas the pinecrest clinic charged us $291.
Thirdly, in response to the owner's argument regarding the subcutaneous fluid kit, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure the reasons given justify charging your clients about 6x the original price of what you would find on Chewy.
And last of all, the owner said, "AI-assisted technology is increasingly used as an additional diagnostic tool in veterinary medicine." I honestly don't doubt this to be true. AI has been and will continue to embed itself into every industry as we know it, so this doesn't come as a surprise to me.
However, the point of contention was that we were never told at any point that AI was being used for the labs or X-ray analysis, nor were we given the opportunity to know that AI interpretation was part of the services we were being charged for.
If you are proud as a clinic to jumpstart on the trend of using AI, you owe it to your clients to be transparent about its use in your practice, especially when it is a billable service. The fact that we only became aware of the AI usage through our own interest in figuring out what the bill entailed, hours after arriving home, is what I find deeply disrespectful.
I found this issue to be the most concerning because you shouldn't reasonably expect that the average person would be comfortable with the idea of their veterinarian using AI to assist in diagnosing or evaluating their pet(s).
