Clinic prescription revenue fell 6.1 points in one year. Here's the category math that matters.Your client's phone says the dog is declining. Your exam says he's fine. Which one do you chart?62% of cats enter homes informally, and CATalyst Council just built the funnel to fix itThe K9 handler training program that turns ER downtime into a referral engineHill's just made the CKD diet compliance problem optionalThe Vegas CE monopoly everyone accepted until Viticus Group just split itThe Oregon AI Misdiagnosis Suit Shows Why Expertise Still Gates TechnologyThe first aid advice you give on the phone just got an evidence baseClinic prescription revenue fell 6.1 points in one year. Here's the category math that matters.Your client's phone says the dog is declining. Your exam says he's fine. Which one do you chart?62% of cats enter homes informally, and CATalyst Council just built the funnel to fix itThe K9 handler training program that turns ER downtime into a referral engineHill's just made the CKD diet compliance problem optionalThe Vegas CE monopoly everyone accepted until Viticus Group just split itThe Oregon AI Misdiagnosis Suit Shows Why Expertise Still Gates TechnologyThe first aid advice you give on the phone just got an evidence base
Practice MoneyBy The VeterinaryPracticeNow Desk3 min readSeptember 3, 2026
Clinic prescription revenue fell 6.1 points in one year. Here's the category math that matters.
AVMA data shows the clinic's share of dog prescriptions dropped 6.1 percentage points year-over-year. The category split matters.
The veterinary clinic's share of dog prescription purchases fell 6.1 percentage points from 2023 to 2024, according to AVMA Sourcebook data cited in the new PETMETRIX Pet Medicine Home Delivery Report.
What the 6.1-point drop is made of
By 2024, 47.5% of dog owners purchased prescriptions through their veterinarian. The rest went elsewhere, online pharmacies, big-box retailers expanding pet Rx fulfillment, and e-commerce platforms now treating pet meds as a retention play.
The report draws on AVMA Sourcebook data, Vetsource Veterinary Analytics tracking 6,574 U.S. practices, and a February 2026 Packaged Facts survey. It does not name specific online platforms' gross merchandise volume because no major home-delivery player publicly discloses sales; PETMETRIX models some market-share estimates rather than reporting direct figures, and flags that limitation explicitly.
The shift shows up in visit data too. Visits fell 3.1% in 2025, the fourth consecutive year of decline. Wellness visits dropped 3.8%. Product-only visits, the ones where a client swings by for a heartworm refill without an exam, fell 6.2%. PETMETRIX identifies product-only visits as the category most vulnerable to home delivery, because a routine refill no longer requires stepping into the clinic.
What the number is NOT
The 6.1-point drop is an average across all dog prescriptions. It does not tell you which drug categories are bleeding share and which are holding.
The report notes that not every medication category faces equal e-commerce pressure. Compounding pharmacies, custom doses, flavors, formulations, still depend on the veterinarian-pharmacy-client relationship. A flavored gabapentin suspension for a 12-pound cat is not a commodity you price-shop on Amazon.
The report does not quantify which categories are most vulnerable or what the margin profile looks like across different medication types. What it does make clear: the loss is not evenly distributed, and knowing your own dispensing mix matters more now than it did when the clinic was the default fulfillment channel.
The Packaged Facts survey found that 74% of pet owners considered prescription medications too expensive, up from 63% in the prior survey. Fifty-seven percent reported concerns about affording their pet's care.
That is the frame a client brings to the conversation when you write a heartworm prescription. The question is not whether Chewy is cheaper, the client already checked. The question is whether you have a counter-move that competes on convenience rather than trying to match a price you cannot.
PETMETRIX identifies practice-branded online pharmacies, automated refill reminders, home delivery, and streamlined authorization processes as tools that let a practice compete without surrendering margin. The report does not model what share of lost revenue those tools recover, but the logic is: if the client is going to buy online either way, better they buy through your portal where you still capture some margin and maintain the relationship.
What this means for a three-doctor practice
The triage: know which categories you can defend and which are already gone. Compounded meds, you keep. Beyond that, the answer depends on whether you have a home-delivery option that does not require the client to drive to the clinic for a product-only visit.
For the associate DVM whose comp plan includes dispensing bonuses: this shift cuts your paycheck, and you have zero control over the client's decision to fill elsewhere. The conversation worth having with the owner-DVM is whether the comp structure should shift toward exam and procedure revenue instead of dispensing volume, because the latter is now a shrinking base.
For the owner-DVM: the lost margin does not disappear if you ignore it. It shows up as either higher exam fees to recover overhead, or restructured wellness plans that bundle prescriptions at a price point that makes driving to Chewy less attractive. The report does not prescribe which move to make, but it does make clear that holding exam fees flat while prescription revenue leaks is a choice with a cost.
The full PETMETRIX report is available on request at the company's website. The data it carries, visit declines, category vulnerabilities, client affordability sentiment, is the kind of thing you either factor into next quarter's pricing or explain later why the P&L missed.
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