About 20 minutes to set up · claude.ai only

Draft the specialist referral letter in one pass

Today

You are sending a dog to internal medicine and the history is spread across eight visits, two lab reports, and a note you dictated at nine at night. Writing it up properly means rereading all of it, so the letter goes out thin and the specialist calls you for the parts you left out.

With Claude

You paste the de-identified timeline and get back a structured letter with the history, what has been ruled out, what was tried and how the patient responded, and one clear question for the specialist. Plus a short plain language note for the owner.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping a veterinarian prepare a referral to a specialist. Produce two documents. You must not diagnose, must not offer a differential list, must not recommend any diagnostic or treatment, and must not comment on any drug or dose. Your job is to organize and clearly present only the facts I give you.

Use [Patient] and [Client] throughout instead of names. Do not include any record number or contact detail I did not provide.

Who I am referring to and why:
[specialty, for example internal medicine, surgery, oncology, cardiology, neurology, criticalist, and the one thing you want from them]

Signalment and general history, de-identified:
[species, breed, approximate age, sex and reproductive status, relevant lifestyle or housing, and the chronological story of the problem with approximate dates]

Diagnostics performed and results, pasted as-is:
[bloodwork values, imaging findings as the radiologist or you described them, cytology, culture, anything else. Paste the actual wording]

What has been tried and how the patient responded:
[treatments, duration, and response, in your words]

Current medications, exactly as written:
[list them]

What the client already knows, what they have consented to, and any constraint that matters:
[for example cost ceiling, travel distance, unwilling to pursue surgery, other pets at home]

Document one, the referral letter. Use these sections: reason for referral and my specific question; signalment; summary of the presenting problem; chronological history; diagnostics performed with results exactly as I pasted them and no interpretation you added; treatments tried and response; current medications listed exactly as I wrote them with no adjustment and no commentary; what the client knows and has consented to; my specific question again at the end; and a bracketed contact block for our clinic.

Document two, a short note for the owner, at a sixth to eighth grade reading level: why we are sending you to a specialist, what a board certified specialist is, what to bring with you, what usually happens at a first specialty visit, and a bracketed line noting that scheduling and cost come from the specialty hospital rather than from us.

Rules you must follow. Never add a clinical finding, a date, a lab value, or a medication that I did not state. Never state a prognosis, a survival figure, or a statistic. If something is missing that a specialist would clearly need, do not fill it in. List it at the end under a heading called Needs the veterinarian.

What to skip in veterinary practices

  • Clinical diagnosis, drug dosing, and anesthesia protocols. This one is not negotiable. Claude is not a veterinary decision tool, it is not cleared as a medical device, and it will state a wrong number in a confident sentence that reads exactly like a right one. Do not ask it to calculate a dose, convert a concentration, build a constant rate infusion, choose an anesthetic or premed, interpret bloodwork or radiographs, or work up a case. Dosing and anesthesia errors are lethal. Use your formulary, your references, and your own arithmetic, every time.
  • Client and patient records in a consumer chat window. HIPAA generally does not apply to veterinary practices, because a clinic is not a HIPAA covered entity, so the rule you are actually following is your state veterinary practice act plus the AVMA Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics, which treat record information as confidential and released only with client consent or a court order. Anthropic's Business Associate Agreement covers HIPAA-ready services such as Claude Enterprise with HIPAA compliance activated and the first-party API, and Free, Pro, Max, and Team sit outside that coverage anyway. Do not paste practice management exports, client contact or payment details, or full patient records. Work from de-identified summaries and reusable templates.
  • Anything clinical reaching a client without a licensed veterinarian reading it first. Discharge sheets, estimate explanations, and referral letters all carry professional liability, and a draft that reads well can still be wrong. Nothing Claude writes establishes or stands in for a veterinarian-client-patient relationship, which under federal and state law has to be built on a veterinarian's own examination before anyone diagnoses or prescribes. Claude never answers a client's medical question directly. The veterinarian approves every word that leaves the building.

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Before you try it

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