Almost a year after expanding its veterinary telemedicine platform to include direct-to-farm delivery of medications, information technology start-up VETson now offers a medication ordering/distribution/delivery app.
The Norwich, Ont.-based company sees its model as crucial to helping livestock farmers across Canada and beyond navigate the ongoing shortage of large animal vets.
The company was founded in the early 2020s by Colin Yates and his father Glen, a veteran mixed-animal practitioner who was concerned about the scarcity or absence of access to large animal services in large parts of Canada.
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VETson began as a model for farmers outside the service areas of vet clinics to establish “Vet Client Patient Relationships” (VCPRs) with practitioners remotely and to receive diagnoses and advice without an on-farm visit.
The start-up’s “clients” were the vet clinics, with VETson’s team doing the leg-work necessary for those clinics to expand their customer bases and potentially hire on more vets to help serve the remote-access farms.
Speaking to Farmtario at the company’s booth during the 2025 Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show, CEO Colin Yates said VETson has successfully signed several clinics in the provinces where VCPRs are mandatory, as well as in the U.S.. But he admitted there’s still a large untapped market of clinics that haven’t yet embraced telemedicine.
The CEO added, however, that the introduction of a medication ordering/distribution/delivery app in October 2024, has resulted in numerous farmers in underserved areas making calls to vet clinics hoping to establish VCPRs – an arrangement Colin Yates referred to as “like gold” because it gives the clinic the assurance that they’ll remain within all regulations in working remotely.
Through the new app, a diagnosis is made remotely, a medication is prescribed, ordered and eventually delivered to the farm – with all the behind-the-scenes work done by VETson. This eliminates the need for the farmer to ensure they can get to their clinic to pick up medications within business hours or the need for vets to wait around in the clinic for the drugs to arrive so they can deliver them to the farm.
