Animal Neurology Center ties growth to Instinct EMR workflow
Bottom line
CURRENT BRIEF VERSION: The Animal Neurology Center, a specialty neurology and neurosurgery hospital in St. Louis, says it expanded case volume without adding staff after adopting Instinct EMR, according to a May 1 case study published by Instinct. The practice reported handling about seven MRIs a day, above the two-to-four range cited in the piece, while improving record completion, communication with referring veterinarians, and clinician end-of-day workflow. Founder Fred Wininger, VMD, MS, DACVIM (Neurology), said the biggest operational change was being able to complete exam documentation in real time instead of leaving cases open until the end of the shift. Instinct also frames that kind of outcome as heavily dependent on implementation support, saying its onboarding model includes data migration validation before go-live, workflow-based training, and real-time help during the transition rather than a handoff to self-service materials. (instinct.vet, instinct.vet)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the case study speaks to a familiar pressure point in specialty medicine: growth often exposes bottlenecks in documentation, billing, and referral communication before it creates room for more appointments. Instinct positions its EMR as a single workflow system linking records, treatment sheets, invoicing, and referrer updates, and the broader company push now includes AI-powered patient and visit summaries, plus drug-reference support at the point of care. Just as important, the vendor is also selling implementation as part of the product — emphasizing clean migration, tailored training, and live onboarding support to reduce the disruption that often makes practices wary of switching systems in the first place. That makes this less about one hospital’s software swap and more about how specialty practices are trying to scale without burning out clinicians or adding administrative drag. (instinct.vet, instinct.vet)
What to watch: Watch whether more referral and specialty hospitals point to measurable staffing, throughput, or communication gains — and to smoother implementations with minimal downtime or shorter learning curves — as EMR vendors increasingly bundle workflow, onboarding, and AI tools together. (instinct.vet, instinct.vet)
CURRENT FULL VERSION: The Animal Neurology Center is using its recent growth story to make a larger point about specialty-practice operations: scaling doesn’t have to mean chaos. In a case study published May 1, Instinct said the St. Louis neurology hospital increased case load without hiring more staff, reached roughly seven MRIs per day, and improved both documentation speed and communication with referring veterinarians after implementing Instinct EMR. (instinct.vet)
That message lands at a time when specialty and referral hospitals are under pressure to move more cases through increasingly complex workflows while protecting clinician time. The Animal Neurology Center is still a relatively new facility: Missouri officials said the 7,200-square-foot Creve Coeur hospital opened in January 2025, began treating cases in December 2024, represented a $3.5 million investment, and planned to create 20 jobs while serving as a clinical, education, and industry-collaboration hub. (ded.mo.gov)
Against that backdrop, the Instinct case study frames EMR design as an operational lever, not just an IT decision. According to the company, ANC’s gains came from completing documentation as cases progressed, rather than after the shift, and from using a system that ties together medical records, treatment sheets, whiteboards, billing, and automatic record-sharing with referring veterinarians. Wininger said that structure helped him leave earlier at the end of the day and support more cases the next day, while also giving primary care veterinarians faster access to assessments and plans. (instinct.vet)
The broader vendor context matters, too. Instinct has been expanding its footprint in high-acuity settings, including a 2024 go-live at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in New York, where the company said its platform would support more than 140 veterinarians across 20-plus specialties. More recently, Instinct has also been marketing AI-enabled summaries and point-of-care decision support, including patient and visit summarizers and Plumb’s drug-information tools embedded in workflow. At the same time, the company has been making a parallel argument that implementation support is central to outcomes: in a separate post, Instinct said successful go-lives depend less on a feature list than on clean data migration, validation before launch, workflow-based training, and real-time support during the transition. The company contrasted that with lighter-touch rollouts built around video calls and self-service materials, and included a testimonial from VERG Brooklyn Chief Medical Officer Brett Levitzke, DVM, who said the hospital had minimal downtime, short learning curves across departments, and “could not have opened our clinic without Instinct.” (instinct.vet, instinct.vet)
Outside commentary on this specific ANC deployment appears limited, but the surrounding industry conversation is clear. AAHA’s referral guidance emphasizes shared access to records, completed and pending diagnostics, and coordinated communication between primary and specialty teams. Separately, AAHA has described AI scribing and documentation tools as a way to reduce manual note-taking and improve record completeness, while also signaling that practices should ask questions about how those tools are used. In other words, the ANC story fits squarely into two broader trends: tighter referral coordination, and growing interest in documentation automation. (aaha.org)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the most useful takeaway isn’t that one software platform solved every scaling problem. It’s that specialty growth often fails at the handoff points: incomplete records, delayed communication, duplicate entry, and clinicians finishing charts after hours. If ANC’s experience is representative, real-time chart completion and a tighter connection between treatment, billing, and referral communication can translate into more usable capacity before a hospital adds people or square footage. The added wrinkle from Instinct’s implementation material is that practices may need to evaluate onboarding as carefully as software features, especially if fear of bad migration, downtime, or poor training is what has kept them on legacy systems. That’s especially relevant for referral centers trying to preserve specialist time while keeping pet parents and referring DVMs informed. (instinct.vet, instinct.vet)
There’s also a cautionary layer. Much of the available reporting here comes from vendor-produced material, so the claims should be read as a case study, not an independent outcomes analysis. And while AI and summarization tools may reduce administrative burden, evidence from human healthcare suggests benefits can vary by case complexity and workflow design. The same caution applies to implementation claims: promises of validated migration, tailored training, and live support are meaningful only if they hold up across hospitals with different caseloads, staffing models, and legacy systems. For veterinary leaders, that means the real question isn’t whether AI or EMR integration sounds promising, but whether a given system produces measurable gains in turnaround time, staff workload, record quality, referral satisfaction, and go-live disruption inside their own hospital. (instinct.vet, instinct.vet)
What to watch: The next signal will be whether Instinct and similar vendors can back case-study narratives with broader adoption data, customer retention, or independently validated workflow outcomes as specialty hospitals keep investing in integrated EMR and AI support. It will also be worth watching whether implementation quality itself becomes a clearer competitive differentiator, especially if practices start publicly comparing downtime, training burden, and post-go-live support rather than software features alone. (instinct.vet)