Switching from VIA to a cloud PIMS
VIA has run specialty and emergency hospitals since 1999 and belongs to Antech, part of Mars Veterinary Health. Here is what its owner does and does not publish about price, terms and your data, what a managed move looks like day by day, and what changes on the first morning.
Facts checked on the vendors' own pages, September 4, 2026 · written by the Bittsi team · sources at the end
- You run ambulatory or equine work and need a full copy of the hospital database in the truck, offline, through VIA Sync.
- You want one vendor for software, hardware and network, with a single number to call.
- You run VIA's onsite version on your own Windows and SQL Server setup and have no appetite for change this year.
- You want the price on a page and the exit in writing: from $249 a month, month to month, data exported free. VIA publishes no price, no term and no export commitment.
- You want the hospital floor, anesthesia, dental, inventory, payments, messaging and the pet-owner app in one record, in a browser, priced on one page.
- You want AI in the record: Scribe writes the note and the invoice, Sage briefs every appointment. VIA publishes no AI features.
One system. Nothing to integrate.
Everything below is built into Bittsi and priced on one page. Enter it once and it is everywhere it needs to be: the charge posts and inventory moves the moment a treatment is logged. The only integrations are the ones only a lab or a card network can provide: IDEXX, Antech and Bittsi Pay.
Records and charting
Structured SOAP with templates and dictation; vitals and weight trends; vaccines and certificates; prescriptions, refills and labels; consent forms; the invoice drafts itself from the note.
Also: How the visit flows →Hospital floor
A status board with TV mode and shift handoff; live treatment sheets with due times, owners, protocols and fluid alerts; Crash Card dosing by weight with a CPR recorder.
Anesthesia and dental
Vitals charted every five minutes from the monitor with the drug timeline beside them; Triadan dental charts that bill the procedures when completed.
Also: Dental chart →Inventory and purchasing
Batch-level tracking with automatic FIFO, recall trace in about 30 seconds, purchase orders grouped by supplier, cycle counts and COGS per line.
Money
Estimates that convert in one click, Bittsi Pay inside the invoice, next-business-day funding reconciled to invoices, QuickBooks and Xero export.
Clients
Two-way SMS, MMS and email in one thread per patient, reminder cadences that stop on confirmation, and the clinic-branded Companion app.
Also: Companion app →Reporting
Financial, appointment and inventory dashboards that refresh as charges post; shareable links, scheduled PDFs and exports.
AI in the record
Scribe writes the note and the draft invoice from the conversation; Sage briefs every appointment, flags interactions and lab trends, and reconciles close-out.
Also: Sage →What VIA's own documents say
Not our opinion of the product. What its owner publishes, with the source next to each point.
Who owns it
VIA's own pages say "VIA is an Antech company and part of Mars Veterinary Health." It has been in that family for a long time: VIA came to VCA Antech with the Eklin merger completed on July 1, 2009, and into Mars when Mars completed its acquisition of VCA on September 12, 2017, at about $9.1 billion. The 2021 change from VCA to Antech branding was a rebrand, not a sale. Antech is a laboratory company, which makes the software roadmap a fair question to ask directly.[1][2][3][4][5]
What is published about price, terms and your data
Nothing. No price, tier, term, renewal or cancellation term appears on any public VIA page. No export utility, file format, API or data-return term is published either; "Data mining" on the features page is a reporting feature. The only data product on offer is VIA Safe, a daily offsite backup that keeps the last seven days.[6][7]
What you are running
Onsite VIA is a client/server system on Microsoft SQL Server, with Terminal Server or Citrix for remote access and a VPN for finishing up at home; VIA Cloud runs on AWS. VIA sells and configures the hardware itself, from Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and Xerox. Support is by phone, email and remote desktop during "normal operating hours", which are not published; after-hours emergency support is billed per call.[8][9][10]
Why clinics move
The reasons we hear: the price is a quote, the terms are unpublished, access runs through Windows and remote desktop, and the modern gaps: no documentation AI, no clinical assistant, no pet-owner app. None of that is a criticism of a system built for hospitals in 1999; it is a description of what a clinic needs now.[6][8]
Side by side, from the published record
Every VIA cell carries a source number. “Not published” means the vendor does not say on the pages we checked; ask them, and get it in writing.
| Topic | Bittsi | VIA |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting and access | ||
| Where it runs | Cloud-native, built for the browser from the first line of code; any device, including phones; no server, no install, no nightly batch | "Traditional, onsite server-based VIA" on Microsoft SQL Server, or VIA Cloud on AWS; remote access through Terminal Server, Citrix or a VPN[8] |
| Backups and updates | Handled; nothing to schedule or restore locally | Your server; VIA Safe backs the database up offsite daily and "retains backup sets of the last 7 days"[7] |
| Devices | Any current browser on any device, including phones | Natively on Windows PCs and laptops; Apple computers, phones and tablets through remote access[8] |
| Price and contract | ||
| Published price | Published, from $249 a month: Foundation $249 with one veterinarian included and $99 per additional veterinarian; Standard $379, or $249 with Bittsi Pay as the primary processor, $129 per additional veterinarian. Unlimited staff users on both. The pricing calculator is the bill, not an estimate | Not published[6] |
| Term | Month to month; annual billing saves 10% and can be cancelled at renewal | Not published[6] |
| Setup and migration fees | No setup fee. One fixed migration quote before you sign, included with annual billing; a sandbox loaded with your own records before you commit | Not published; implementation is a milestone-based project with an assigned account manager and onsite training packages[11] |
| Support | One named lead from signature through go-live, then a real person who replies, usually within one business day; engineers answer when a question needs one; demos are hosted by a working DVM | Phone, email and remote desktop during normal operating hours, which are not published; 24/7 emergency support "subject to after-hours per call rates"[10] |
| Your data | ||
| Getting it out | Your data is yours, always: exported free, in standard formats, whenever you ask; no hostage clause, written into the agreement | No export utility, format, API or data-return term is published[6][7] |
| What moves to Bittsi | A named migration lead, one person from signature to go-live: clients, patients, visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances moved, verified row by row against the old system, and you get the report | Clients, patients, visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances are read from the VIA database and mapped field by field |
| What changes on day one | ||
| Documentation | Sage reads the whole chart: an overnight brief for every appointment, lab trends across panels, medication safety checks, close-out reconciliation of what was documented against what was billed, answers with citations. Scribe writes the SOAP note and the draft invoice from the exam-room conversation. Nothing is sent, billed, prescribed or signed without a clinician | Typed notes with specialty and ER templates; no AI features published[12][6] |
| Payments | Bittsi Pay inside the invoice: tap, dip, swipe, Apple Pay and Google Pay on the terminal; interchange-plus with the network cost and our margin on separate statement lines; next-business-day funding reconciled to invoices; refunds in-line; QuickBooks and Xero export; PCI-DSS Level 1 processor | OpenEdge EMV integration; VIA Pay announced March 2026 with surcharging, card on file and link to pay[13][14] |
| Clients | Built in: two-way SMS, MMS and branded email in one thread per patient; reminder cadences at 30, 7 and 1 days and day-of that stop when someone confirms; post-visit summaries and post-op check-ins drafted from the chart; mass campaigns; and the clinic-branded Companion app for pet owners | VIA Text, integrated two-way texting with reminder and confirmation texts, announced March 2026; no pet-owner app published[14] |
| Hospital floor | Built for the hospital floor: a status board for the whole floor with a TV mode and a printable shift handoff; a live treatment sheet for every hospitalized patient with due time and owner on every treatment, overdue in red, protocols for post-op, DKA and CHF, fluid rates with bag-change alerts, and one-click complete that signs, charts and captures the charge; Crash Card emergency dosing from patient weight with a CPR recorder; an anesthesia sheet that charts vitals every five minutes from Mindray, Edan, Bionet and SunTech monitors | Digital whiteboards and treatment flowsheets for critical care; anesthesia and dental charting are not described on the pages we checked[12][14] |
Bittsi prices from bittsi.com/pricing. Bold text marks the stronger side of a row where there is one.
What VIA does well
- Deep specialty and emergency depth: SOAP notes with specialty and ER templates, digital whiteboards for critical-care treatments, graphical flowsheets and task-based billing.
- True offline ambulatory work: VIA Sync carries the complete hospital database to the truck.
- A broad lab bench beyond its parent: Antech, IDEXX, Zoetis, Abaxis, Heska, scil and Phoenix, with two-way Zoetis and IDEXX links.
- DICOM modality worklist, PACS querying and image viewing, with Sound, GE and Cuattro named.
- One vendor for software, hardware and network, with a single source for support.
- Actively shipping: treatment flowsheets, integrated texting, VIA Pay and a Cubex integration were all announced in 2026.
What a switch actually looks like
The same plan for every clinic that moves to Bittsi, with a date and an owner on each step. It is written into the Switch Guarantee.
- 01Before you sign: one fixed quote and a sandboxWe size the migration from your current system and load a sandbox with your own records. You click around your real patients, not a demo clinic.
- 02Days 1 to 3: exportYour data comes out of the old system while it keeps running. Nothing changes for the front desk.
- 03Days 3 to 8: mapping and importClients, patients, visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances, mapped field by field. Anything that cannot be mapped cleanly is archived read-only and labelled.
- 04Days 8 to 10: verificationEvery record checked against the source, row by row. You get the report.
- 05Days 10 to 13: training by roleShort sessions for the front desk, technicians and doctors on the parts they touch, not an all-day shutdown.
- 06Day 14: go-liveOn a lighter day, with your launch lead on call. The old system stays readable for reference until you retire it.
Questions clinics ask about VIA and Bittsi
Who owns VIA now?
Antech Diagnostics, part of Mars Veterinary Health, by VIA's own description. VIA has been in the VCA and Antech family since 2009 and in Mars since 2017; the 2021 switch to Antech branding was a rename, not an acquisition. Nothing on VIA's or Antech's sites says the product is being retired, and we do not claim it.
What does VIA cost?
VIA does not publish a price, a contract term or cancellation terms; the number comes from a sales conversation, and VIA also sells the hardware and network it runs on. Ask for the software, hardware, support and after-hours rates in writing. Bittsi publishes its price: from $249 a month on Foundation with one veterinarian included and unlimited staff; Standard $379, or $249 with Bittsi Pay, and nothing to buy for the back room.
Can all my VIA history move?
Yes. Onsite VIA keeps everything in a SQL Server database, which our migration lead reads directly; for VIA Cloud we work from the export VIA provides. Clients, patients, full visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances move and are verified row by row against the source, and anything that cannot be mapped cleanly is archived read-only and clearly labelled.
We do ambulatory work. Does Bittsi work offline?
No. Bittsi is a cloud system, and a phone hotspot or a second connection is our standard advice for the truck. VIA Sync's full offline database is a genuine strength for mobile and equine work, and we say so above. If most of your day is on the road with no signal, weigh that honestly before you switch.
How long does it take?
About 14 days from kickoff to go-live for a typical clinic: export and mapping in the first week, verification and role-based training in the second, then a supported go-live on a lighter day. VIA stays available for reference until cutover.
What happens to the server and the VIA hardware?
The server becomes a backup you keep for as long as your state's record-retention rule requires. Everything else keeps working as ordinary computers, because Bittsi runs in the browser on what you already own, including the Macs, tablets and phones VIA reaches only through remote access.
Sources
Every VIA statement above points to one of these. If a vendor page changes, tell us and we will change the row: info@bittsi.com.
- [1]Company, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [2]VCA Antech completes merger with Eklin Medical Systems, VCA Antech, via GlobeNewswire, 2009.
- [3]Mars, Incorporated completes acquisition of VCA Inc., Mars, via PR Newswire, 2017.
- [4]Company page, archived August 4, 2021, VIA Information Systems, via the Internet Archive, 2021.
- [5]Company page, archived October 20, 2021, VIA Information Systems, via the Internet Archive, 2021.
- [6]Key features, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [7]VIA Safe, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [8]Technology, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [9]Hardware, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [10]Support, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [11]Training and implementation, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [12]Solutions, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [13]Payment processing, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [14]News, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
- [15]Partners, VIA Veterinary Information Systems, 2026.
VIA and the other product names on this page are trademarks of their owners, used only to identify their products. Bittsi is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Vendor facts were read on the vendors' own pages on September 4, 2026 and can change; if you are the vendor and something is out of date, email info@bittsi.com and we will check it and correct the page within two business days.
See your own data in Bittsi before you decide.
One fixed migration quote, a sandbox loaded with your records, and a 30-minute walk through your real patients. No slides.