A hole on tomorrow's schedule usually isn't a hiring problem. The practice may already have three relief-willing vets or techs who could have covered it, but nobody sent them the shift before it was too late to fill. That's a visibility problem, and it's the specific piece technology has actually gotten good at solving, even while the underlying veterinarian shortage hasn't fully resolved.
The Gap Is Usually Information, Not People
Brakke Consulting's data reported through AVMA shows the labor market easing: the share of practices with an open veterinarian position dropped roughly 10 percentage points from 2024 to 2025. That's real progress, but it also means the coverage gaps still showing up on a schedule are increasingly a scheduling and communication failure rather than a raw shortage of people willing to work.
A practice manager juggling a phone, a group text, and a wall calendar can really only reach the two or three relief people they remember first. If none of them are free, the shift goes unfilled, even if a fourth or fifth person on the roster would have said yes if they'd been asked in time.
What Practices Are Actually Adopting
The same Brakke survey found real momentum behind practice technology generally:
Scheduling and relief-management software follows the same logic scribe tools do: it removes a manual, error-prone step so staff time goes toward patient care instead of coordination. The shift is from "one person's memory of who's available" to a system every relief professional can see and claim from.
Technology Closes the Gap Practices Can Actually Control
No software fixes a genuine shortage of licensed veterinarians in a given metro. What it fixes is the much more common failure: a shift going unfilled not because nobody was available, but because nobody available heard about it in time. Groups that have already moved relief scheduling off spreadsheets and group texts consistently report the same thing, that most of their "staffing shortage" was actually a scheduling visibility problem wearing a staffing shortage's clothes.