You may have heard the exciting news: With Plumb’s now under the Instinct umbrella, we’ve been hard at work on something big! 

We’re thrilled to be releasing a new peer-reviewed clinical reference tool for veterinary professionals that we’re calling Standards™ (aka Standards of Care™). 🥳🎈 

What Is Standards of Care?

Standards is a reimagined and expanded evolution of Plumb’s Pro, our clinical decision support tool for veterinary professionals.

Just like Plumb’s Veterinary Drugs has become your go-to for drug information, Standards is designed to be your first stop for everything else in daily veterinary practice—from clinical signs to diagnoses, procedures, treatments, client handouts, and more.

The entire Standards resource is rigorously reviewed by specialists and practicing veterinarians (even the client handouts!), and it includes all of Plumb’s. Plus, it’s expert-authored, continually updated, and available anywhere you practice. 

Even more exciting, today’s release is just the start of what we have planned. 

Standards of Care is a project I’ve been dreaming about for years, and I believe it could become one of the most important tools for our profession in the decades to come. 🔭

That’s a bold statement—one equally matched by the ambitious nature of the project itself. But ‘ambitious’ is what Instinct does best—especially when it’s necessary. 

We’re often asked what made us take Standards on and how we chose the name, so I thought I’d pull back the curtain a bit.

📖 The Background

Veterinarians are increasingly daunted by an ever-expanding bank of medical knowledge while trying to provide the best and most up-to-date care to our patients. 

To highlight the point, researchers have estimated that in 1950, medical knowledge doubled every 50 years. By 2020? Every 73 days. 😳

Let that sink in: Medical knowledge now doubles roughly Every. 70. Days. 

This brings us to one of the core challenges modern veterinarians face, yet surprisingly few people talk about: clinician confidence. 

We all want to provide each patient with the best options, but when you’re constantly faced with a seemingly endless stream of new drugs, new treatment regimes, new diagnostics, and even new diseases, it’s hard to consistently feel confident—even as an experienced clinician. 

At best, this can slow us down, making decisions more difficult and reducing practice efficiency. At worst, it can contribute to stress, burnout, and unoptimized or ineffective patient care. 

We’re living in an extraordinary moment in medical history. It’s time we acknowledge it and tackle it head-on—because our patients and clients deserve nothing less.

💡 Big Problems Require Big Solutions

Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, has said that for modern doctors, “science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.” 

In summary, medicine has progressed to a point where our ability to help our patients is less dependent on new medical breakthroughs and more on our ability to act appropriately on the massive amount of information already available.

No level of experience or hyperspecialization can overcome the sheer amount of medical knowledge we face. 

That’s why Instinct has always built clinical decision support into our practice systems: our patient safety warning system, drug calculators, predictive billing and live estimates, Plumb’s embedded in prescribing and ordering workflows, and more. 

Of course, this confidence challenge isn’t unique to veterinary professionals. Human health professionals face the same challenge—but one that is much closer to being solved. Many of our medical counterparts in human medicine rely on tools like UpToDate, a peer-reviewed, constantly updated resource fully embedded in their workflows. 

While we certainly have many valuable reference tools in veterinary medicine, we haven’t yet had an easily accessible, continually updated, mobile-first resource that supports real-time decision-making as we work up cases, prescribe medications, and educate clients.

Until now. 

🧠 Why Is It Called “Standards of Care”? 

With Standards, we’re building something different from traditional books or reference tools. Our goal is to create a modern veterinary resource that reflects the realities of practice today. 

Here’s the truth: There is no “standard” for most of the challenging work veterinary teams do.

While the term “standard of care” gets thrown around a lot, veterinary care isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula; it exists on a spectrum. Things like the latest research, clinical experience, available evidence, client expectations, and financial realities all come into play when figuring out the best approach for each patient. 

That’s exactly why we built Standards of Care: 

• It’s made to be your first-line reference, layering the most relevant and recent literature with current expert insights.
• It provides clear, structured guidance and special considerations for atypical cases as well as common clinical challenges, so you can make confident decisions in a wide range of clinical scenarios.
• It acknowledges the spectrum of care we all must consider in our daily work, so you have the support you need to decide what’s best for each patient, client, and situation.
• It’s built for everyone—general practitioners, emergency veterinarians, and specialists alike—with a carefully balanced, evidence-based yet practical approach that we believe is so needed.

Of course, any modern point-of-care reference wouldn’t be complete without the most trusted name in veterinary drug information. That’s why Standards is built on the foundation of Plumb’s, giving you access to the full trusted drug database and tools, seamlessly built in alongside all the clinical guidance.

Think of Standards like having your favorite specialist on speed dial. 

Whether you’re looking up the latest prognostic information on a mast cell tumor, managing the anaphylaxis emergency that just came through the door, tackling a strange clinical situation involving something you treat all the time, or refreshing your memory on a procedure you haven’t done in months, Standards is here for you.

🚀 I Need This! When Will It Be Ready?

Great news: It already is! 

Developing content at this level—with the depth, accuracy, and care veterinarians deserve—takes time. 

So it’ll come as no surprise that we’ve been hard at work on the dream of Standards of Care for several years. If you’ve been using Plumb’s, you might be familiar with our first iteration, Plumb’s Pro (now Standards), which thousands of veterinarians around the globe rely on to help them confidently provide high-quality care to their patients and clients.

🗺️ What’s Next for Standards

To me, the most exciting part of this launch is that Standards of Care is just the beginning of what we’ve dreamed up. (If you already use Instinct products, you know what we mean.) 

With the initial foundation in place, we’re laying the groundwork for even bigger things:

✨ Clinical information deeply embedded in your workflows (think Standards in Instinct’s practice software)

✨ New content types and tools (think clinical calculators for Plumb’s!) 

✨ AI-enhanced tools powered by trusted, expert-authored, and peer-reviewed information

Standards is our bold new approach to simple, helpful, thoughtful—and dare I say, magical—point-of-care referencing for the way we practice today (and tomorrow). And it’s designed by the only team that could: you, we, us.

At Instinct, we’re in this with you, and we’re building Standards because we get you.

We hope you’ll join us.🧡

Ready to check it out? Standards (app and website) is available to everyone starting today at standards.vet.