It’s a well-known and sad fact that cats see the vet much less often than dogs.

For years, the pet industry’s knee-jerk explanation has been that cat guardians must somehow care less about felines (or are less willing to spend) than dog guardians.

This is clearly not the case. A (much) more informed explanation is that cat guardians care deeply, but face higher barriers to care, or friction. 

This can take the form of:

Just thinking about all that potential stress can outweigh the sense of urgency, which ultimately means the vet visit might get deferred.

These factors combined contribute to the feline medicalisation gap. According to CATalyst Council, under one-third of cats in U.S. households go to the vet in any one year, versus over two-thirds of dogs in households.

This is precisely the problem that AI-enabled pet care platform PetsApp is trying to address.

Founded in 2020 by Cambridge University-educated vet Thom Jenkins, PetsApp positions itself as a communication and care coordination layer between local veterinary clinics and pet guardians. 

“Cat owners don't come in to [the vet] as often [as dogs],” Jenkins told Feline Business Brief. “You have to ask yourself, why is it that cat owners love their cats less than dog owners love their dogs? I think that's a very easy trap for us to fall into. If you think about that for more than two seconds, of course that isn't true.”

PetsApp is an AI-powered client engagement tool which provides client communication, reminders, appointment booking and digital payments to hundreds of clinics and thousands of veterinary professionals.

Overall, the platform is designed to reduce the friction pet guardians can face when seeking veterinary care.

“When people want access to healthcare, they want it to be low effort but high trust,” Jenkins said. “And there’s no one more trusted than healthcare professionals.”

Interestingly, PetsApp aims to be an interface between a pet guardian’s trusted local veterinary clinic rather than a broad pet care platform à la Chewy.

“We're very aligned with keeping the local veterinary clinic at the heart of the pet care experience,” Jenkins said.

“The local entity is the most trusted destination for pet parents and partners. So if we can layer convenience on top of the already highly trusted touch point, that is in opposition to Chewy’s mission, which is to layer trust on top of a highly convenient touch point.”

Many cat guardians actively try to avoid clinic visits because of the stress they cause their animals. Cat owners often want reassurance that “they’re protecting their cat from the stress of a visit,” Jenkins said.

Rather than asking guardians to commit immediately to an in-person veterinary visit, PetsApp enables a “low-threshold entry point,” he said. 

A worried guardian can send a message, share a photo, or describe symptoms in minutes. From there, the clinic guides next steps, which could take the form of reassurance, monitoring, or an in-person appointment.

For cats, this significantly reduces missed symptoms as well as potential stress.

While AI is emerging as a key tool for handling information gathering, compiling symptom histories, and helping triage, Jenkins stresses that it is not a replacement for veterinarians.

“Veterinary professionals assisted by AI will massively outperform veterinary professionals without AI, but also massively outperform AI alone,” he said. 

The future clinic is unlikely to be fully virtual, he added: “You can’t upload your pet to the cloud… they are physical beings in a physical world.” 

For the feline market in particular, removing friction when seeking veterinary care is expected to expand the addressable healthcare economy. According to CATalyst Council, the U.S. feline veterinary market has the potential to grow 2.5 times to US$32 billion if feline medicalisation matched that of dogs.

Tools and platforms such as PetsApp that facilitate earlier veterinary care may well accelerate that transition, encouraging spending toward veterinary treatment.

AI-powered tools and platforms such as PetsApp can help tackle friction in feline access to care. Here’s a small selection:

Discomfort / health tracker: AI-powered health trackers and feline discomfort detectors can help to read cats’ faces for signs of pain, without having to travel to the clinic.

Remote triage / telehealth: AI tools can gather symptom details before an appointment, structure owner responses, and flag urgency, allowing clinical teams to prioritise cases more effectively. 

Note-taking (scribing): Reducing administrative load by automatically generating medical records from consultations, freeing veterinarians to focus on the interaction with the patient. By absorbing routine cognitive and administrative tasks, AI can help expand clinical capacity.