Earlier this year, a veterinarian in Connecticut performed a basic exam upon a senior horse prior to sedating him for a routine dental procedure. The 19-year-old gelding was a standard pasture puff–in he was in good condition, basically healthy, and a low-maintenance kind of guy. But when she put her stethoscope to his chest and heard what sounded like jungle drums thumping inside, she knew something wasn’t right. There was no cardiac murmur, jugular venous distension, or dependent edema. What was going on? And what would happen if the horse was sedated as planned?

Standing in that Connecticut field, the veterinarian was able to get a cardiologist’s opinion on the animal’s cardiac status, without transporting the animal (or the cardiologist).

Telemedicine, and specifically telecardiology, isn’t new. The basics of the service that puts experts alongside ambulatory practitioners have been in place since the 1980s. But the technology has changed with the times, and the practice today has little similarity to when Deborah Hadlock, VMD, Dipl. ABVP, and CVA, of IDEXX Telemedicine started working with CardioPet, the predecessor to IDEXX, in the 1980s.

"It’s really expanded in terms of what diagnostic information comes in to us to be assessed," Hadlock said. "In the 1980s, only few veterinarians were doing echocardiography, and most of those were based at university hospitals. That new technology came to the fore and has been fine-tuned and developed. Now we have color flow Doppler, and all these things have been added on. So that’s given us enormous amounts of information to go along with our ECGs to interpret the cardiac status of an animal