Tying and Bundling

Antitrust, Compliance, Industry, Industry News, Kickbacks, Tying and Bundling

Veterinary Equipment Bundling: Nobody Can Compete With Free

“A veterinary clinic is offered a CT scanner at no upfront cost. An ultrasound machine, a digital x-ray system, a PACS — all of it, free, or nearly free. The condition: sign a multi-year laboratory-services contract. The equipment is not free. Its cost is buried inside the lab contract, paid over years, and ultimately funded by pet owners through diagnostic pricing that never had to compete. This article is written from the perspective of the company that sells imaging equipment honestly, at a real price — and cannot survive against a price that is not real.”

Compliance, Fee Splitting, Industry, Industry News, Kickbacks, Tying and Bundling

Veterinary Teleradiology Kickbacks: The Law & The Industry

“The federal Anti-Kickback Statute does not reach the veterinary side, but Nevada NRS 638.1404 prohibits referral compensation arrangements not disclosed to the client, Texas categorically prohibits them regardless of disclosure, and the AVMA Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics state that “a veterinarian should not offer or receive any financial incentive solely for the referral of a patient.” Despite this legal architecture, the operational forms the prohibited conduct takes — published loyalty programs like IDEXX Points where points scale with referral volume, private per-study referral compensation characterized as marketing fees, equipment-placement deals tied to referral commitments, and corporate-consolidation revenue capture under vertically integrated structures like Mars Petcare’s Antech-AIS-VCA-Banfield architecture — remain a routine feature of the commercial market. This article documents the legal framework, the operational forms the prohibited conduct takes, the harm to patient care and client trust, and what happens when state attorneys general, state veterinary boards, or federal enforcers begin to take notice.”

Industry News, Industry Basics, Tying and Bundling

Veterinary AI’s Training-Set Problem — Part Three: The Validation Statistics

“The first two parts of this investigation calculated the labor required to produce the training corpora claimed by SignalPET, Vetology, and Antech RapidRead, and demonstrated that the math does not work — at the simplest annotation step, at the bounding-box step, at the segmentation step, and against the structural infrastructure veterinary medicine has not built. This article closes the series by addressing what happens after training is supposedly complete: what the products are required to demonstrate, what they actually demonstrate, and the corporate revenue model that explains why a category of medical-decision-support software exists that operates entirely outside the validation framework that constrains its human-medicine equivalent. The two halves of this article are different in tone — the first half is technical and statistical, the second half is structural and economic — but they answer the same question: why is the foundational accuracy claim of commercial veterinary AI radiology software so consistently weak, and so consistently absent from the kind of independent verification the human-side AI category requires as a precondition of going to market?”

Industry News, Antitrust, Tying and Bundling

VitalRads: The Full Story

“Brian Poteet didn’t build veterinary teleradiology — he observed how it was done at PetRays, departed, and started his own company. What he built was eventually good. What happened to it is something else: the VITALRADS trademark was transferred to a private equity consolidator in 2018 without any public announcement, the brand now sits on a $1.7 billion distressed debt pile, and independent clinics are being steered to it through a “membership organization” that is operated by the same corporate owner. None of this is disclosed at the point of care.”

Antitrust, Compliance, Industry, Tying and Bundling, Uncategorized

The Stack: How IDEXX Built a Vertical Monopoly Over Veterinary Imaging — From the X-Ray Machine to the Radiologist’s Report

“IDEXX has spent fifteen years acquiring every layer of the veterinary imaging workflow — hardware, PACS, software, teleradiology, and the residency pipeline that trains new radiologists. The result is a referral architecture that routes toward IDEXX by design and away from everyone else by friction.”

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