America’s best animal hospitals and AAHA accreditation: A winning combination

One afternoon, Amanda Finn received a nightmare of a call at work when her dog walker told her that a dog at the dog park injured her boxer mix, Presley. Finn wasted no time taking action. She grabbed her belongings and raced to the local emergency veterinary hospital, where the dog walker had taken Presley.

From her dog walker’s call, Finn knew that Presley’s condition didn’t appear to be life-threatening. But, of course, she eagerly wanted to be by her beloved pup’s side. Unfortunately, she faced obstacles getting information about Presley, let alone access to him, upon her arrival at the busy hospital.

Once reunited with Presley, Finn realized he was in worse shape than she’d expected. She saw his paw, bloody and mangled, and questioned whether he’d be able to walk on it again.

Finn had many questions about his condition, but felt like the answers she received were frustratingly vague.

The overall feeling, she said, was that they were patched up, sent away, and told to follow up with their primary vet.

These kinds of emergency situations are always going to be scary and stressful, of course, but Finn couldn’t help comparing the experience to what she was used to with her usual vet’s office, where everything from the layout of the facility to the communication from the staff seemed to be on another level.

A lack of verified rankings

Over the weekend, Finn thought a lot about how to go about finding a great veterinary hospital that a pet parent like her could trust. As the associate director and enablement lead at Plant-A Insights, a data analytics firm that partners with media brands like Newsweek and USA Today to put out rankings and awards, like “America’s Most Admired Workplaces,” she knew how to solve the problem. However, when she ran some searches, she didn’t come up with any “best of” lists with the kind of research and third-party verifications she wanted to see.

“Why are there no rankings that look at animal hospitals?” she asked. “There are so many for human health. As a pet owner, I would love a list I could look at!”

Methodology

Because no lists of this sort existed—at least not on a nationwide, third party-vetted level—Finn and her team recognized that they had a tremendous opportunity to create a unique list that could really benefit the growing number of pet parents out there. But to do it right, they needed to make sure they understood not only the aspects of veterinary care that those families found most important, but also, the factors that indicated an animal hospital was truly practicing excellent medicine and providing great care to patients and clients.

Plant-A surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. pet owners about the importance of the following eight categories when it comes to choosing an animal hospital for their pet(s):

• Quality of care
• Veterinarian experience and quality
• Emergency services
• Location and accessibility
• Staff friendliness and communication
• Facility conditions
• Customer service
• Pricing and affordability

They then conducted a thorough desk research effort to create a database of over 15,000 animal hospitals before collecting more than five million customer ratings and reviews from social media for these animal hospitals from the last five years.

Qualifying criteria included:

• Employs four or more veterinarians
• Offers both surgical care and in-house diagnostics
• Has 100+ customer reviews across the last five years

Plant-A developed a proprietary Generative AI Large Language Model to help analyze the qualifying hospitals, then scored and ranked them based on four dimensions:

• Overall star ratings (40%)
• Category sentiment score based on eight key categories (30%)
• Special services offered (10% bonus points)
• AAHA accreditation (20% bonus points)

AAHA only discovered the fact that Plant-A included AAHA accreditation as one of four key dimensions used to evaluate and rank American’s top 500 animal hospitals once the list was published. However, it makes sense, according to Garth Jordan, AAHA CEO.

“Practices choose to become accredited because they’re committed to practicing high quality medicine, providing both patients and clients with an exceptional experience,” Jordan said. “This recognition of how adherence to our standards helps practices do that simply reinforces that alignment.”

That alignment was significant; 499 out of 500 hospitals on the list were AAHA accredited.

Of course, a practice does not need accreditation to practice excellent medicine. However, in their research, Plant-A found that hospitals adhering to AAHA’s standards aligned well with the factors they considered when selecting hospitals to include.

“Our AAHA accreditation team works with these practices to help them understand and implement protocols to ensure they meet the standards of accreditation,” said Jessica Vogelsang, DVM, AAHA’s chief medical officer. “And because practices are reevaluated every three years, we feel confident that these practices stay up to date on those standards.”

For example, the rankings considered factors like facility conditions and practicing quality medicine. And, as anyone who’s gone through the accreditation process knows, AAHA’s mandatory standards directly address those same factors in a variety of ways.

A list and a locator

Newsweek’s list, featuring practices from coast to coast, provides a great starting point for pet parents seeking guidance in finding the right veterinary hospital for their beloved animals. The AAHA Hospital Locator offers another tool for this purpose, especially for pet parents living in an area with high quality but smaller animal hospitals that may not have met some of the criteria for this list, like the number of veterinarians.

And, as for Presley, this tale has a happy ending. He visited Finn’s regular vet (who happens to work in an AAHA-accredited hospital) for a follow up appointment. Today, his injured paw has fully healed and he’s back to his playful ways.

Photo credits: FatCamera / E+ via Getty Images
Amanda Finn

Disclaimer: Trends content is meant to inform, educate, and inspire by providing an array of diverse viewpoints. Any content published should not be viewed as an official stance, position, or endorsement by the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) or its Board of Directors.