VetPulse / Glossary / DSO (Veterinary)

What is DSO (Veterinary)?

Short for "Dental Service Organization" — a term borrowed directly from dentistry, where it originated, and now used loosely across veterinary medicine for any corporate or investor-backed group that owns and operates several practice locations under shared back-office, purchasing, or reporting infrastructure. In veterinary specifically, the same structure is sometimes called a Veterinary Support Organization (VSO) or simply a "consolidator," but "DSO" remains the more commonly searched term. It sits at the large end of a spectrum that starts with a single independent practice and passes through small multi-site groups (two to half a dozen locations, not yet a full corporate DSO) before reaching full corporate scale — each stage changes what benchmarking and reporting need to answer.