Case Study: Document AI and Life Sciences
Just Food for Dogs
Uses Docugami to Save Time
– And Save Lives
When Shelby Olguin, a registered veterinary technician at Just Food for Dogs,
describes her work before implementing Docugami's AI-powered document analysis,
she doesn't mince words: "I was drowning in records."
describes her work before implementing Docugami's AI-powered document analysis,
she doesn't mince words: "I was drowning in records."
INDUSTRY
Life Sciences
CHALLENGE
Just Food For Dogs, a national dog food provider, runs a division that creates custom therapeutic diets for pets with serious illnesses. Each case requires reviewing massive volumes of veterinary records. The manual review process overwhelmed staff. The waiting list often included 100 or more pets, while staff could process only 10–15 cases each week. Wait times stretched to 12 weeks from consultation to receiving food—an eternity for sick animals and desperate pet owners.
RESULTS
The 12-week waiting list has been eliminated. Instead of processing 10-15 cases per week, Just Food For Dogs can now help 30+ pets per week.
KEY FEATURES
- Parsing complex records
- Extracting and organizing medical data
- Eliminating transcription errors
50%
Reduction in data extraction time
200+%
Improvement in weekly throughput (processing capacity)
90%
Reduction in wait time (from 12 weeks to ~1 week).
The Challenge: Drowning in Medical Records
National dog food provider Just Food For Dogs operates a division focused on creating custom therapeutic diets for seriously ill pets. It’s painstaking work, but in many cases the right scientifically-crafted diet can make a dramatic positive impact on a sick dog’s health. Each case requires reviewing massive volumes of veterinary records to extract critical medical information needed to formulate life-saving custom diets.
"Sometimes we get a patient who goes to one vet, so we've got a single document that's maybe 50 or 100 pages long," Olguin explains. "Other pets that are sicker have had to see multiple specialists and have gone to special imaging hospitals. I've seen up to 30 documents come in for a single pet, and sometimes a single document can be 300 pages long."
Each case requires Olguin to meticulously review every document to confirm essential information—baseline lab work including chemistry panels and complete blood counts, urinalysis results, medication histories, and specific diagnostic details like stone analysis reports. The manual process was overwhelming.
Shelby Olguin, a registered veterinary technician at Just Food for Dogs, with her dog Patrick.
Olguin estimates she was only able to process approximately 60 cases per month. If critical information was missing, cases had to be sent back to pet owners for additional records, further delaying treatment.
“It was a process that had me pulling out my hair,” she says.
The bottleneck was severe: Just Food for Dogs therapeutic diet division often had a waiting list of 100 or more seriously ill pets, with only 10-15 cases processed weekly. Wait time stretched to 12 weeks from consultation to receiving food. For desperate pet owners that felt like an eternity.
The Solution: AI-Powered Document Intelligence
Desperate for a solution, the Just Food for Dogs team decided to experiment with Docugami's Document AI technology.
Dr. Chris Margrey, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist, recognized the transformative potential immediately: "I would have cried if I had had Docugami when I started my training, it would have saved me so many hours of my life and allowed me to help so many more patients."
Dr. Chris Margrey, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist, recognized the transformative potential immediately: "I would have cried if I had had Docugami when I started my training, it would have saved me so many hours of my life and allowed me to help so many more patients."
Docugami's AI system automatically parses complex veterinary records, extracting and organizing critical medical data into easily accessible tables and reports. Instead of manually scrolling through hundreds of pages searching for specific lab values or diagnostic information, the AI presents everything veterinarians need in a structured, accessible format.
"As you're scrolling through 300 pages, eventually your eyes start glazing over and you can miss one line on page 176 where it said something important” Dr. Margrey explains. “Having an AI tool that can identify and pick out information and highlight it for you in a much more easy-to-read method is so much better for me as a doctor, as far as making sure I don't miss anything. Nothing slips through the cracks in the pet's medical history."
“Rather than helping 10 seriously ill pets in a week, we can now help 30 or more, which at the end of the day is why we got into the medical field."
Dr. Chris Margrey
Board-Certified Veterinary Nutritionist,
Just Food For Dogs
The Results: Dramatic Efficiency Gains
Incorporating Docugami into their information process has been transformative, resulting in a number of key benefits:
- Massive Speed and Efficiency Gains: Olguin's time spent identifying and recording vital medical information has been cut in half, enabling her to expand her responsibilities and begin learning diet formulation for healthier pets. The amount of time required for Dr. Margrey to create a custom diet for a seriously ill pet has been reduced by nearly two-thirds.
- Dramatically Reduced Wait Times: The 12-week waiting list has been eliminated. "We can have somebody in a consultation on Monday, design a diet for them on Tuesday or Wednesday, and be making food by the following week," Olguin notes.
- Enhanced Accuracy: AI eliminates human transcription errors that could occur when manually extracting data from lengthy documents. "It also improves medical accuracy and standard of care throughout the process," Dr. Margrey emphasizes.
- Increased Capacity: The efficiency gains allow the team to help significantly more animals. As Dr. Margrey puts it: "Rather than helping 10 seriously ill pets in a week, we can now help 30 or more, which at the end of the day is why we got into the medical field."
With capacity no longer such a difficult issue and virtually no waiting list, the Just Food for Dogs team is now eager to expand their therapeutic nutrition services. “We know there are many more sick dogs out there that could benefit from our scientifically formulated nutrition, but until now we just didn’t have the bandwidth to help them. Now we can.”
Beyond Efficiency: Better Medicine
The transformation extends beyond mere time savings. Just Food for Dogs occupies a unique position as potentially "the only company in America that can do a custom diet" for pets with complex, multiple conditions. Their fresh-food approach allows nutritional flexibility that would be impossible with traditional kibble or canned foods.
“A lot of pets have two or three things going wrong with them—there's not a singular diet on the market that will cover all of what they need," Dr. Margrey explains. For example, pets with both kidney disease and pancreatitis require low-fat, low-protein diets, but most commercial renal diets are higher in fat, often triggering pancreatitis episodes.
The AI-powered efficiency enables more personalized care: "I can make better tailored diets so that owners are happier with the diet they get, have better efficacy for helping the pet I'm working with, make it faster so I can help more animals, and do it more accurately."
The Broader Impact
The Just Food for Dogs case demonstrates AI's potential to drive efficiencies and accelerate innovation across the Life Sciences sector. Just as Docugami’s sophisticated AI can identify, extract, and utilize critical data and information in complex and highly varied veterinary records, Docugami can unlock the data in virtually any Life Sciences document, from clinical trial records to detailed documentation of drugs, vaccines, and medical devices.
The team at Just Food for Dogs encourages other groups and individuals in document-intensive sectors to investigate the potential of document AI to support and enhance their work. "When we first got started, we had some people saying that AI was going to replace nutritionists and start making recipes for dogs and take our job away,” Dr. Margrey recalls. “In our experience, it's been the point to the contrary. It actually makes our job a heck of a lot easier."
The results speak volumes: 50% reduction in time spent extracting critical data from documents, processing capacity tripled, wait times eliminated, and most importantly, life-saving nutrition reaching sick animals weeks or months sooner than previously possible. In veterinary medicine, that time difference can mean everything.
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