Veterinary Blueprints

#24 Safe Pet Anesthesia at Your Fingertips with Dr. Gianluca Bini

Bill Butler Season 2 Episode 24

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Dr. Gianluca Bini introduces Safe Pet Anesthesia, a revolutionary telehealth service bringing board-certified anesthesia expertise to general veterinary practices across the country. This innovative platform connects specialists with veterinary teams via video call during procedures, dramatically improving patient safety while making expert anesthesia care accessible to all pets.

• Only about 200 board-certified veterinary anesthesiologists exist in the US, with most concentrated in academia or specialty hospitals
• Safe Pet Anesthesia allows practices to book specialists who monitor cases remotely via video call from pre-op through recovery
• Monitoring—not drug protocols—is the key to safe anesthesia and preventing complications
• The service costs a fraction of specialty referral prices, making expert care accessible to more pet owners
• Veterinarians can focus on surgical procedures while specialists guide technicians through anesthesia management
• No contracts or minimum commitments required—practices pay per case
• Many clients willingly pay extra for this service when offered as an option
• Technical setup requires just a smartphone, internet connection, and the included tripod mount
• The platform also offers customized training for veterinary teams, both virtually and in-person

Visit safepetanesthesia.com to learn more about bringing specialist-level anesthesia care to your practice.


Host Information

Bill Butler – Contact Information

Direct – 952-208-7220

https://butlervetinsurance.com/

bill@butlervetinsurance.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbutler-cic/

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Welcome to the Veterinary Blueprint Podcast brought to you by Butler Vet Insurance. Hosted by Bill Butler, the Veterinary Blueprint Podcast is for veterinarians and practice managers who are looking to learn about working on their practice instead of in their practice. Each episode we will bring you successful, proven blueprints from others, both inside and outside the veterinary industry. Welcome to today's episode.

Bill:

Welcome to the Veterinary Blueprints podcast. I'm your host, bill Butler, bringing you business and entrepreneurship insights for the veterinary community. Today we're joined by a special guest, dr Gianluca Bini, a board-certified veterinary anesthesiologist and founder of Safe Pet Anesthesia. He recognized the limited access to specialized anesthesia care and he launched Safe Pet Anesthesia to improve patient health and educate veterinary teams. In addition to leading this initiative, which I'm sure takes a lot of his time, he is an assistant professor teaching on anesthesiology and pain management at Oklahoma State University. So let's dive into this journey and impact of expert anesthesia care for veterinary medicine. Welcome, dr Beeney.

Gianluca:

Thank you, bill. Thank you for having me, and it's a honor being on your podcast.

Bill:

Absolutely so. We met at VMX. I was just walking around and you had a beautiful golden retriever in your booth on the last day I believe and I just was like your dog stopped me in my tracks and I wanted to say hello and in fact one of your aisle mates said you should go talk to Dr Beeney. He's got a very interesting product and a past podcast guest from Vetland, and so we struck up a conversation. It kind of went from there. So why don't you tell you know I got a little bit of your background, but why don't you share for our guests? You know your start to veterinary medicine and how things got going for you.

Gianluca:

Yeah, so I started get into that. In Europe there are very few places where you can do a residence in anesthesia, and so as soon as I graduated and moved to England I did two internships, one in anesthesia and the other one is a rotating internship. And then I was always fascinated by the States and the training that you guys have over here. It's, you know, really, really good and so I wanted to come over here for my residency. I applied and I got into a residency at North Carolina State University and then, after completing that, I moved to Ohio State. I stayed there for two and a half years as an assistant professor of anesthesia and analgesia there and then, when I left there and moving here to Oklahoma, I really realized how. You know how little access the average veterinarian has to an anesthesiologist. Right, there is only about a little bit more than 200 of us in the country which, if you think about it, so that you know there's people trained in anesthesia.

Bill:

you know veterinarians receive training in anesthesiology, but board certified anesthesiologists are a rarity anesthesiology, but board certified anesthesiologists are a rarity.

Gianluca:

Yeah, it's a really rare species, and so, you know, most of us are in academia or in highly specialized referral centers. Nobody is, you know, dealing with GPs, nobody's dealing with mid to small size referrals, and that's where most actually most of the pets get anesthetized, which makes it really, really sad and it limits their access to one of us terribly. And so it was like how do we make this accessible and affordable for these pets and these pet owners? And that's where the idea came from for Self-Pet Anesthesia. We created a custom built platform that allowed us to follow cases and receive video feeds from different devices.

Gianluca:

Most people use a smartphone and they literally can just book us for a case, upload the medical record, scan the protocol that they want to use. We give them feedback on that and then, whenever it's time to perform the anesthetic event, they just put us on their phone and we follow the whole case from start to finish on video call. And we make this super affordable for them. And this was the only way of doing it was to do it online. If somebody had to go there physically, between travel and all that stuff, you know it would make it insanely expensive for the average veterinarian, which is not.

Bill:

So that's a big jump being an academic, you know, ohio State University, and then going to Oklahoma and then saying I'm going to be an entrepreneur, and your wife was with you. She's kind of your sidekick business partner. Probably not your sidekick, you're probably her sidekick, based on how things. She's your social media person, dog wrangler, she, she, she looked like she was taking care of everything down there and you know. So I met the both of you and so how do you sit down? As you know, if there's another veterinarian out there who wants to seize a need in in animal, animal health, you know you going from academic academia to saying I want to open a, you know, entrepreneur, you know I'm going to become an entrepreneur and launch this business. What does, what did that look like? What was that conversation when you went home?

Gianluca:

Yeah, you know it was scary at first. You know it's kind of a jump into the void. You know you're used to being on a salary and now you actually have to invest money and usually you know FYI for whoever is listening usually the first couple of years you actually lose money. Yes, you don't make money. That was an interesting way of you know using our savings really. Yeah, you got to be passionate.

Bill:

Well, and there's a Beyonce quote, and Beyonce, uh, the Beyonce quote goes like this I don't often gamble. When I do, I always bet on me. And so you know, as an entrepreneur, you're betting on yourself. That, uh, you're gonna, you're gonna come out ahead when you're, when you're making those, those, uh, educated guests, gambles, I guess.

Gianluca:

Yeah, it's. You know I. I really hope that the gamble pays off. Um, to be honest, like you know, it's been um, it's been a journey right. There's a lot of things that you really don't know when you start a business. You know, and even the small things, right. You know what hosting platform do you use for your website. You know even little things like that it's so easy to lose. You know a grand here and there and like at the end of the year, when you actually like go and look at it, you're like holy crap, how much money I wasted on stuff that I didn't know, that.

Bill:

You know I should have done different or whatnot, but that's a national convention, or just buying t-shirts or giveaways to pass on. I mean, like all those little things, like, okay, we're going to go do a booth at a national show, we have to have some stuff to give away. What do we want to give away? Those are $4 each. Holy cow. It's going to cost me, you know, $5,000 just to have this stuff to give away.

Bill:

And and so, yeah, I think you know when you, when you go to start a business, right, there's, there's all, there's the grand plan. It's like this is the end vision, but it's all the small details, from A to Z.

Gianluca:

Yeah, the costs rack up super easy. Right, and providing a service, I think, like this, where it's unheard of right. Nobody's doing this in the country. Nobody's doing it for GPs, nobody's doing it for small size referrals. You know there is a couple of people that do it for highly specialized places, but you know the difference in pricing is significant. You know it's hard because a lot of veterinarians don't even know that you exist, they don't even know that that's an option, and so, like it's been hard, like you know, having those conversations and, and you know a lot of people assume at the beginning that what you're doing is just give them a list of drugs that they can use. And that's exactly what we do not do. You know we, we, we give you that, but we follow your whole case and that's where the the, the juice is. You know.

Bill:

So you know if I'm a veterinarian and you know I want to practice safe anesthesia in my practice. You know what do you think or what are your. You know if you're going to give me some of the safe practice and you know safe pet anesthesia essentials for my practice. What are some of those?

Gianluca:

And, yes, this is what I always tell my students. Right, I give you the answer that I give to my students and some of the clients I have that you know. The very first question they always ask is what's your protocol? What drugs do we use? Right, and people get hooked up on that. But in reality, the true answer there is that it doesn't matter. Right, like the drugs that you use in 99% of pets, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you know what the drugs do and how to fix it if something happens.

Gianluca:

And so monitoring long story, short monitoring is key. The patients do not die because you use the wrong drug, assuming that you stay within the normal dose range. Right, like, of course, if you give the full bottle of ketamine, for example. Of course that's a different story. But if you stay within the dose range, the patient doesn't die because you picked the wrong drugs or, you know, if you had a better protocol, the patient would have survived. That's not the case. The reason why the patient dies is because the monitoring was lacking, somehow. Right, there is places out there and nowadays this is rare, but you know there is. There were some places, at least till a few years ago where there wasn't any monitoring. You know there was, they would monitor. You know, pulse oximetry maybe, and that's about it. And and you know that's not probably good practice anymore. Um, you know, we, we should. Once you have proper monitoring and you have the know-how on, you know what's happening. How can I fix this? That's how you make it safe.

Bill:

Fixing something before it gets too bad to fix Too bad.

Gianluca:

Yeah.

Bill:

In my non-anesthesia layman terms terms. So you know I've gone under anesthesia personally a couple times. For a couple you know procedures I'd broken a leg and needed a metal plate, my leg. And you know you go talk to the orthopedic, but when you're, when you're getting ready to go in, I go speak with the anesthesiologist before going under anesthesia. And so you know to relate this to animal health, my mom had a Gordon Setter that really had bad reactions to anesthesia and and so and any sort of medication like that, and so in the vet world, why don't, why isn't there more consultation with anesthesiology before a procedure?

Gianluca:

Yeah, part of this is again the lack of personnel, right, like there isn't enough of us to cover all that side. Yeah, you know, it's actually a very easy conversation to have and a lot of owners nowadays they are aware. You know a lot of people go under anesthesia more and more often. A lot of people had one anesthesia more and more often. A lot of people had their one of their family members go under and they have seen they had that experience with anesthesiologists and they would really love to have that for their pet.

Gianluca:

A lot of the clients want to have some reassurance around anesthesia. You know, when we started this business we thought that you know, veterinarians will call us for very complex cases. What we found out is that once we are out there in that practice we end up doing, you know, a lot of spay and neuters, which are relatively easy cases. But the reason is that the owners want that. You know the owners is like oh my God, you have something like this, I want it. I don't care about the extra. You know $100, $200. You know they're like you know I want to have an anesthesiologist watch after my pet and so it is an option nowadays.

Gianluca:

You know, with a service like ours. You know we can speak with the client too, like if you have a client that would desire to have a chat with us. We told them to do it beforehand and after. You know, I had actually a conversation with one of the clients from one of the clinics we followed the other night and you know the dog was doing okay, but she wanted some extra reassurance. She wanted to speak with one of us and we did so. It's doable Nowadays. It is doable. It wasn't an option until a few years ago.

Bill:

So, as an entrepreneur myself and sales guy 20 plus years in the sales world, just thinking about what you just said if I'm a veterinarian it's, you know, $150 to have a monitoring of anesthesiology and as I'm putting your pet under that conversation is I've included in the cost of the spay neuter monitoring of anesthesiology. By this, by this, you know this, this, this organization. However, you position that as a practice owner, right?

Bill:

if you don't want that, I can remove it, but just include oh right and then, and then you know you're, you're including that service and, as a pet owner, even if I don't have a conversation with you, I know my pet's being monitored by anesthesia, by an anesthesiologist, versus you know nothing against anyone in the profession, but I don't know. You know, again, it's the specialty of how that's being monitored and that's where the case goes wrong. And so you know, if I'm a pet owner and I'm like, well, I can get this monitored instead of not, well, yeah, I'll pay the extra $100 on the $500 deal.

Gianluca:

Yeah, it's an interesting concept, right? So some clinics do include us in every estimate they make. Some other clinics give them the option. Some clinics do not give them the option.

Gianluca:

They just put it down, yeah, and it's easy enough, and it also makes it easier for the vet. What happens nowadays, the way that works in most general practices or small referrals, is that the veterinarian is focusing on the surgery, but also it gets asked all the time, if anything was wrong with the pet, what to do by the nurse that's taking care of the anesthesia. The nurse is looking at the monitor, is watching and is monitoring, but the veterinarian gets, quote unquote, pestered continuously about hey, doc, this is not. The blood pressure is low.

Bill:

What do we do?

Gianluca:

I'm focusing on the technical aspect of the surgery right now, not trying to monitor the vitals Exactly, exactly, right. So you know, the service doesn't just help the, it helps the technician to have that support, sure, right, and have their sole attention on that aspect. And then it also helps the veterinarian because they can finally focus on what they do best, which is the procedure, you know, and so it takes away the stress from them. It takes away the stress from the owner, the technician. It's less stressed as well. They love it, they feel empowered, they learn a lot, right, like when we, when we, we don't just tell them hey, do this. You know, we tell them hey, do this, because this is what we're seeing and this is how it works. So it's also learning opportunity for them and it's a growth. It's a growth opportunity for the nurses as well.

Bill:

You're just you're. You're helping level up the entire team by using this service right, not just getting the service itself, but just being around providing a higher level of care.

Gianluca:

Yeah, that's exactly what we do. We also offer some you know a lot of those clinics. They want also extra training. So not only we do cases for them, we offer both online and in person. You know, we have some clinics where there is one specifically in New York where they want us to be there every six months for a week for training. They use us every day for cases, but they also want every six months for a week to be there in-verse, and so actually I'm flying out in a couple of weeks and I'm going out there.

Bill:

So let's talk about the process. Right, so you do the education piece, but what does the actual, you know your integration on a case look like? To actually remote in and help with a case and monitor a case, what does that look like?

Gianluca:

It's actually super easy, right. The clinic gets set up first. You know, there is no cost. We don't have a contract, really it's an uppercase basis. There is zero annual minimum or anything like that, nothing like that. We have an initial meeting and we chat about how their anesthesia look like at the moment. We send them a survey where basically they fill out like what drugs they have, what monitoring they have and you know a few other questions related to you know the anesthetic process that they currently do, and then we basically have a five-minute walkthrough on, like you know, how does your anesthesia induction area look like? How does your ROAD look like, so that the first time that we have a case we don't need to worry about you know how things are set up.

Gianluca:

Right, exactly, exactly. And we know how to help you because we know what drugs you have, what drugs you don't have, what monitoring you have. You know. And so we're ready to go from the beginning. And then, when you have a case that you want to schedule us for, you just go on our website. You schedule us for a case and then the morning of, we already read all your medical records, you upload that when you schedule it, and then the morning of you just send us a picture of your protocol that you're using for that specific path. We tell you, okay, yeah, this sounds good, or maybe we need to tweak something on this, based on what you already have. And we know what you have. And then, whenever it's time, you just pull us up, you know on your phone, you literally log into our website, the video starts automatically and we're there with you the whole time, from induction to recovery.

Bill:

So things go well, everything's fine. Let's say you're in the middle of a case and you notice something that is, like you said, going wrong and you need to catch it before something goes wrong. How does that process work in the middle of a case?

Gianluca:

So it's super easy. We just tell them. Just tell them. You're like hey, look, this is what we're seeing on the monitor. You know, they they usually most people point us use their phone and they just point it to their monitor. Um, we, when we do the setup, we send you a um, a tripod and a stand for your phone, that it's magnetic, it also sticks to metal, so like you can put it on your anesthesia machine and whatnot. And so they just point us to the monitor and we, we watched it the whole time.

Gianluca:

If we see something, we'll tell you immediately. We're like hey, you know, the heart rate is dropping, we need to give some atropine, for example, and we give you the dose and all of that, of course. And, uh, if they see something and you know, example, they have a question. Or sometimes, because they point us to the monitor, the surgeon has a better view of what's happening surgery-wise. If the surgeon sees, for example, some little bit of extra bleeding, for example, or something like that, they can just let us know and they're like hey, doc, you know this dog is bleeding a little bit more. Shall we do anything different? And you know, and that's when we give them this suggestion. So it's a two way conversation. The whole time you know we're there with you. It's like having one of us right there with you.

Bill:

So because, like ultimately, ultimately at the end of the day, and so because, like ultimately, ultimately at the end of the day, and I don't know because I was under anesthesia when I was having my procedures and I'm not a medical professional. So whatever happens, you know kind of behind the scenes, but my guess is, as an anesthesiologist and correct me if I'm wrong I'm just on here. You're sitting in there monitoring. If you were actually physically there, you would be monitoring the machines and the procedures that goes along, and if something needed to happen, you would say to the tech administer a half a milliliter of X, and then the technician would do that. So instead of you physically being in the room, you're there virtually doing the exact same thing that you would be if you were sitting in the room, exactly doing the exact same thing that you would be if you were sitting in the room Exactly.

Gianluca:

And consider that usually you know, in our everyday job, like if I was, like on my physical job, like where I you know, for example, like Oklahoma State or before when I was at Ohio State, there is usually one anesthesiologist and there is about 10 to 12 nurses and we often have 10 to 15 cases asleep at the same time.

Bill:

So you're bouncing from OR to OR like how's this one doing? Okay, they're going to get ready to close up over here, we're going to start wrapping this up. So you aren't even in so physically in person at Ohio state or Oklahoma state. When you're monitoring 10 cases at once or five cases at once, you're not physically in the room for all those, you're just bouncing in monitoring them.

Gianluca:

Exactly this is you bounce by from OR to OR. You just look at the monitor and it's like, okay, this is doing, okay, this is doing, okay, this needs help, help. And so then you, you go in and you, you tell the nurse, um, or the technician, you know what to what to do. So this is exactly the same. It's in a smaller scale, um, but, and it's virtual right, so it's, it's the. This the exact same thing, is just that, of course, it's over the phone, and that's what makes it much more affordable for these practices that are smaller and they obviously can't afford one of us full time You've got to be sitting in there 24-7, 365.

Bill:

Or not 24-7, 365. But just be on staff getting that salary. As you mentioned before, as a you know, board certified anesthesiologist, you're in such high demand to say, hey, you know I need XYZ to be at your practice every day while you're doing procedures. So you know you're very passionate about this. What from a from an animal perspective and transitioning to this, you know what kind of is driving you to. You know you said there's expense and, and you know it's not all about money, but it's also the kind of the scary part of being an entrepreneur Kind of what's driving you and your wife to say that you know we want to bring this to animal health across the country and potentially world well, you know, um, part of this was realizing that you know we live.

Gianluca:

I live 45 minutes to an hour away from where I actually go from oklahoma state. Okay, I don't really live in down where the university is. If something goes wrong with my dog, I need to take him around here yeah and realizing that there is only two anesthesiologists in the whole state of Oklahoma.

Gianluca:

that's nuts and nobody has access to one of us. We have zero clinics actually in Oklahoma. We don't service anybody yet around here. And that, to me, made me realize even more. I was like this is crazy, like if, when I speak with my clients, like you know, happy New York, in whole New York city, there is three anesthesiologists and yeah, in long Island there is zero. Okay, so like it's, this is like out of this world. Like you know, a lot of institutions out there they hoard them right. Like there is some places like UC Davis, for example, they have 12 anesthesiologists and North Carolina state has nine, right when, when the total pool is 200 or a little bit more, you know, in some places at 10 or 5 or 6.

Bill:

80% of them are in academia versus. You know they're writing protocols but they're not in the trenches helping animal health on a day-to-day basis monitoring a case when it goes bad, that you just can't call up the professor that you had 15 years ago at college and say at veterinary school and say what should I do? Now You're on your own in the OR trying to figure it out.

Gianluca:

Yeah, it was the idea of, like, trying to expand care to as many pets as possible. You know, we can cover way more pets by doing this. I mean, don't get me wrong, the people in academia are doing an amazing job. They're great, you know, fantastic, you know. But that covers the 1%, which is also the 1% that can afford this right, like they can afford, you know, the $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $10,000 bills that they will get in a in a referral place, you know, versus, like there is a bunch of pets that can't, or pet owners that can't afford that, you know, and and that's why they go to their gps. And you know, we're not, we're not trying to steal cases to anybody like these are pets that any way they wouldn't go in a referral, they can't afford it, period. That's a bunch of cases that those places wouldn't see anyway.

Bill:

Well then, you're making a financial decision based on animal health that you might not otherwise have to make if you can get affordable care at the highest level from your general practitioner. And then back to the struggles that veterinarians are having. Just generally overall you look at some of the market coming back down a little bit for some of them down from the high COVID numbers and the more that they can keep internally. You know if they if they can monitor potentially difficult case internally versus having to refer that out they're keeping some of that, rather potentially be able to keep some of that revenue at their practice by offering you know the service there versus referring it out.

Gianluca:

Yeah, no, that's, that's very true. There is a bunch of pets that you know how many times I hear. You know this owner, it's really worried about anesthesia. Or this pet you know it's a little bit more complicated it really needs to go somewhere with an anesthesiologist, but the owner doesn't have the money. And what ends up happening is they could do it at the vet, at the GP, but they can't afford the referral. Or the pet cannot afford to wait six months to get to a referral list right on a wait list, and what ends up happening is that the pet doesn't get care.

Bill:

Yeah, so who's losing here is the animals, and that's what made us and the owners, right like the owners caring for their animal, aren't able to make a good decision.

Bill:

I mean my mom, like I mentioned about my mom, she I, I know how much she spent on that Gordon setter.

Bill:

She would have spent more than 200 bucks on a consultation with an anesthesiologist before a call.

Bill:

She would have spent, you know, four figures for sure, uh, based on uh cause she man, she loved that dog and so you know she knew that there were issues with anesthesia, with that, with her, with her dog over time and, um, you know the more times they had to have procedures done and teeth cleanings and this other stuff, it just every time they went in it got worse and worse. And so you know, I just know from my own personal experience through my mom and her gordon setter kenzie, um, she definitely would have, would have made use of this service, um, and in fact was taking her dog to a referral specialty center because she felt like she was able to get a higher level of care. Well, in wrapping up, as we talk about this, what's one kind of tidbit you would give veterinarians who are thinking? One kind of tidbit you would give veterinarians who are thinking how would this work for my practice, or how would I offer safer anesthesia or safer pet anesthesia at my practice and integrate this in?

Gianluca:

What would that look like To get set up? It's super easy with us, you know. You can just. You can just go on our website or our social media. You can look up Safe Path Anesthesia on Facebook threads or Instagram, and we have all of our links there. It literally takes a 15 minutes conversation on Zoom.

Bill:

That's you know so what you're saying is and I'm a big, again, a big sales guy the number one rule in sales is make it easy for people to give you the money. So if you're a veterinarian out there who wants to offer safe anesthesia at your practice, you can do it with Safe Pet Anesthesia, and I think your website is safepetanesthesiacom. It is so we'll have all that in the show notes. It is so we'll have all that in the show notes. What's one tip or piece of advice you would have for a veterinarian out there who's looking to become an entrepreneur and start their own side hustle slash? All my eggs are in this basket. I want this thing to really work Business owner.

Gianluca:

Well, go for it, just jump in it. Do it. Just jump in it. Do it If you, you know you can spend hours and hours and hours thinking about it. You can spend hours going through endless pages on Reddit and trying to figure out how to make it work and but the best thing you can do is jump, do it. And I think you know you're never going to be sure that it's going to work. But if you never try, you'll never know.

Bill:

Well, I think what you've got with safe pet anesthesia is something that can work. It was very unique. I liked hearing your story when we were at VMX and I'm glad that you were able to come on the podcast today and share a little bit of your story and how you're bringing Safe Pet Anesthesia to every veterinarian out there who wants, has got an internet connection and wants to use your services.

Gianluca:

Thank you so much, Bill. We really appreciate being here and we're really honored to be on your podcast. Thank you for having me Absolutely Well.

Bill:

we hope to see you soon and we'll have some information in the show notes. But safepananesthesiacom. Dr Gianluca Bini, I got your name wrong but I'll get this. He's a board-certified anesthesiologist at Oklahoma State University as assistant professor, entrepreneur and founder of SafePen Anesthesia. Thanks for joining us today on the podcast and, as always to all of our guests and listeners out there, make sure to like, share and comment on the podcast. It will help with the algorithm on the back end and we look forward to seeing you all soon.

Gianluca:

Thank you, everybody.

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