Anyone working in veterinary medicine understands how central medication management is to the health of the patient, the experience of the client, and the operational and financial stability of the veterinary practice. Prescribing impacts patient care, workflow speed, and revenue; it also influences how practices manage time, staff resources, and internal priorities. Platforms like VetWay, which are built specifically to support veterinary electronic prescribing and prescription approval workflows, have emerged in response to the growing complexity of how medications are prescribed and fulfilled across the veterinary ecosystem.
While VetWay is built to support true electronic prescribing and direct digital communication with pharmacies, the reality is that not every pharmacy is fully integrated yet. To account for this gap, VetWay supports fax capture as an interim capability, allowing veterinary practices to manage incoming fax-based prescription requests within the same unified workflow. This approach is intentional and transitional. Fax capture exists to reduce disruption and administrative burden today, while the broader network continues to move toward fully digital, end-to-end electronic prescribing with pharmacy partners. The objective is not to preserve faxing, but to replace it, without forcing practices to manage parallel systems in the meantime.
Over the past eight years, as pet owners have gained greater access to online pharmacies, retail pharmacies, and e-commerce medication options, the demand for filling veterinary prescriptions outside of the practice has steadily increased. This shift toward external prescription fulfillment in veterinary medicine did not emerge suddenly. It developed as the convenience economy expanded, as clients became more comfortable sourcing pet medications online, and as competitive pricing and delivery options became widely available. The COVID era accelerated this transition dramatically, normalizing online ordering across nearly every category of consumer life and reinforcing behaviors such as subscription purchasing, autoship programs, and on-demand delivery. What began as a necessity became habit, and that habit has evolved into a mainstream expectation among pet owners seeking veterinary prescriptions.
In response, many veterinary practices have adjusted how they manage medications by reducing in-clinic inventory and redirecting focus toward higher-value clinical services. Inventory management is expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to justify for medications with short expiration windows or infrequent prescribing patterns. For some veterinary practices, shifting away from internal prescription filling and toward services that rely on professional expertise has improved operational efficiency and practice revenue. Other practices continue to maintain traditional in-house pharmacy models, while many operate somewhere in between. Regardless of approach, external prescription fulfillment has always existed in veterinary medicine. Compounding pharmacies routinely produce customized medications or short-shelf-life formulations that cannot be effectively stocked in a clinic and must be prepared individually for specific patients. What has changed is not the existence of external veterinary pharmacies, but the scale, frequency, and administrative impact of managing outside prescriptions.
As more veterinary prescriptions are filled externally, the administrative workload placed on veterinary teams continues to increase. Each outside prescription transaction often requires review, approval, clarification, or documentation, while the revenue traditionally associated with dispensing medications shifts away from the practice. At the same time, technology has begun to reshape how veterinary prescription approvals are handled, falling into two fundamentally different categories that are frequently misunderstood as interchangeable: faxing and electronic prescribing. To busy veterinarians and staff, the distinction may appear minor at first glance. In reality, the difference between faxing veterinary prescriptions and true electronic prescribing is substantial.
Faxing, even when digitized or routed through electronic systems, remains a fax. It is an image-based transmission of information that depends on formatting, legibility, transmission quality, and manual interpretation. A skewed page, faint text, missing fields, or unclear dosing instructions can disrupt what should be a simple veterinary prescription approval process. When a pharmacy cannot clearly interpret a faxed veterinary prescription, the result is a call, a return fax, or follow-up communication that interrupts clinical workflow and slows care delivery. Electronic prescribing for veterinary practices operates differently. It is fully digital from creation to fulfillment, transmitting structured data with standardized fields, clear dosage instructions, and complete patient and client information. Veterinary electronic prescribing improves speed, accuracy, and safety by reducing ambiguity and eliminating many points of failure inherent in fax-based workflows.
For veterinary practices, the impact of electronic prescribing is felt not only in speed, but in reduced friction across daily operations. Pharmacies receive veterinary prescriptions in a consistent, readable format that supports faster processing. Veterinary teams can review, approve, and respond to prescription requests within a single digital environment rather than juggling phone calls, fax queues, and fragmented communication. Workflow no longer depends on whether a fax machine is functioning, whether a page printed clearly, or whether staff are available to answer inbound calls. With platforms such as the VetWay Approval Portal and VetWay Electronic Prescribing network, veterinary practices gain a centralized system that consolidates prescription approvals, enables bidirectional communication with pharmacies, and supports true digital prescribing workflows. Veterinarians and staff can submit electronic prescriptions, view all pending and completed transactions in one place, respond instantly, and maintain accurate oversight of each patient’s medication history. While these improvements may appear incremental individually, across a full clinical day they translate into significant time savings and more predictable operations.
Fax consolidation services attempt to reduce some of the administrative burden by organizing incoming prescription requests into a single queue. While these solutions may improve visibility, they do not resolve the underlying limitations of fax-based veterinary prescribing. A fax remains unstructured, vulnerable to misinterpretation, and disconnected from patient-specific clinical data. Veterinary electronic prescribing, by contrast, supports safety features that faxing cannot, including allergy awareness, medication interaction visibility, and access to current prescription history at the point of approval. These capabilities are essential for modern veterinary medication management and cannot be replicated through fax-based systems.
Veterinary medicine is moving toward electronic prescribing because it aligns with how modern veterinary practices operate. Faster turnaround, clearer communication, safer medication workflows, and improved client experience are no longer optional. External prescription fulfillment will continue to grow, and veterinary practices will continue to manage approvals outside of their walls. The determining factor is not whether this reality exists, but whether practices rely on outdated fax-based tools or adopt veterinary electronic prescribing systems designed for today’s prescribing volume and complexity. Faxing reflects the past. Veterinary electronic prescribing represents the future.