Ontario
Built to the standardyou are inspected against
The College of Veterinarians of Ontario sets rules for medical records that most practice software treats as optional, and every accredited facility in the province is inspected against them. PetGrid is built to them on purpose. Here is each requirement and the thing in the software that answers it, so you can check rather than take our word.
$259 CAD per practice per month plus $90 CAD per veterinarian, plus applicable sales tax, published, with no setup fee.
The standard, and the answer to it
| What the standard asks for | What PetGrid does |
|---|---|
| The initials of the person making each entry, and the date it was made. | Every clinical entry records who wrote it and when, and shows both on the chart and in the released record. |
| An audit trail that documents changes while keeping the original information, with corrections recorded as additions carrying their own date, author, the entry changed and the reason. | Nothing edits a clinical entry. A correction is an addendum underneath it, carrying its own author, date and the reason for the change, and the original text stays exactly as it was written. A test in the codebase fails the build if anything ever edits or deletes one. |
| Fees shown separately for drugs and for advice or other services. | Every invoice line is marked as a drug, a service, or a third-party charge, and a drug line carries what was dispensed and how much. An invoice that is a description and an amount cannot tell an inspector one from the other. |
| Records released on request and transferred to another veterinarian within two business days, never withheld over unpaid fees. | One page, one click. The whole record: patient, owner, clinical entries with their addenda, vaccines, prescriptions, labs, documents and charges, ready to print or hand over, plus the same thing as data for another system to read. Nothing stands in the way of it, including an unpaid bill. |
| Rabies and health certificates kept as part of the record. | A vaccination record carries the manufacturer, the lot number, the route, the site, the next due date and the tag number, and rabies prints as a one-page certificate with a signature line and the veterinarian's licence number. |
| Retention, encryption, limited access and off-site backups. | Records are kept in a Postgres database with row-level isolation per practice, encrypted in transit and at rest, open to that practice's own staff, to each pet owner for their own pets' records, and to a few named PetGrid administrators for support and backups, and backed up off site by the database provider. Every change to a record, and every print, download and export of one, is logged with who did it; opening a record is not logged yet. |
Rabies vaccination certificate
Riverside Veterinary
12 King St W, Toronto · 416 555 0100
Owner
Animal
Vaccination
Veterinarian
The four underlined fields, and why they are there
- Manufacturer
- Which vial it came from
- Route
- Where the dose went
- Tag number
- What a kennel asks for
- Licence number
- Who signed it
Printed from the patient’s chart. Every field on it was entered once, during the visit.
This page paraphrases the standard. The College’s own guide is the authority, and compliance is the facility’s responsibility, not the software’s. What software can do is stop being the reason a record falls short.
Why nobody else says this
Of the sixteen practice systems we looked at on 22 September 2026, none markets on Canadian record requirements. Most are American or international products with no particular reason to care what a provincial college asks for. An Ontario practice owner worrying about an inspection is on their own with it.
What that means at a practice
- A correction that overwrites the original entry is a problem in an inspection, and many systems let you overwrite.
- An invoice that reads as a list of descriptions and amounts cannot show drugs separately from advice.
- “Send me my dog’s records” is a two-business-day clock, and in many systems it is somebody’s job for the day.
And in PetGrid
- Entries cannot be edited. Corrections are addenda, which is what the standard actually asks for.
- Each line is marked drug, service or third party when it is typed, so the invoice is already right.
- The complete record is a page and a download, available to any clinical member of staff, at any time.
Moving from what you have
Many Ontario clinics run a practice system on a server in the back room. Both imports are free: your clients and pets, then your visit history, so the charts are not empty on the first morning.
The requirements above are paraphrased from the College of Veterinarians of Ontario’s guide to the medical records standard, read on 22 September 2026. Read it yourself: