About

I'm a vet who builds his own tools.

I'm Dr. Steve Pelton. I own and run Hearthstone Animal Clinic, a solo small-animal practice in the Houston and Cypress, Texas area. I've run it since 2007, and I've been in the exam room for more than 25 years. One doctor, a small team, real patients, every day.

I'm not a software company, and I'm not a developer. I'm a vet who got tired of the typing, the phone tag, and the after-hours voicemail nobody returns, and started building my way out of it. An AI scribe in the exam rooms, the pipeline that writes my client communication, a stack of experiments, and a few things that shouldn't work but do. I built them, broke them, and I run the good ones on real cases.

This site exists for one reason. If you've assumed the tools that change this profession will arrive from the big corporate groups, that's a reasonable thing to assume, and I think it's wrong. They're buildable right now, by working vets, on nights and weekends. I'd rather more of us build them than wait for someone to build them for us. So I'm going to show my work.

The best place to start is the journey, the actual order this happened in, including the parts that broke.