What actually belongs in your pet's medical record (and who asks for what)

Ask ten owners where their dog’s vaccination record is and most will say some version of “the vet has it.” That is true and almost useless. The vet has their record of their visits. It does not include the shot the shelter gave before you adopted, or the course of antibiotics from the emergency hospital on the far side of town, or the weight you took at home last month, or the microchip registry your pet was enrolled with by a rescue in another country.

The second wrong model is the folder. A manila envelope in a kitchen drawer with fourteen pieces of paper in it, filed in the order they arrived. It is a real record, and it fails at exactly the moment it is needed, because emergencies do not happen at home.

So before the argument, here is the reference: what a pet’s medical record is made of, and who asks for which part.

What belongs in a pet’s medical record?

Three of those get left out of almost every home record, and they are the three that cost you most when missing. The adverse-reaction line, because nobody writes down the thing that went wrong two years ago. The registry behind the microchip number, because the number alone is meaningless without knowing which database holds it — AAHA’s universal pet microchip lookup tool exists precisely to answer that question, and it will not help if your contact details in that registry are three addresses out of date. And the after-hours hospital, which you look up for the first time in the worst ten minutes of the year.

Which documents does each situation actually need?

The international row is the one to take seriously. Nobody should take pet-travel rules from a blog post, including this one. The requirements are country-pair specific, they change, and the failure mode is your animal being refused at the border. Start at the government authority. The US also has separate rules for bringing a dog into the country, run by the CDC, which since August 2024 has required all imported dogs to be microchipped and at least six months old.

Core vs non-core vaccines: categories, not a schedule

This is a taxonomy, not a dosing plan. Intervals are set by your veterinarian and, for rabies, by local law, which varies by country, state and municipality. Nothing here is veterinary advice.

The category system comes from the WSAVA Vaccination Guidelines Group, which publishes global guidance, and from two regional bodies in the US: the AAHA canine vaccination guidelines for dogs and the 2020 AAHA/AAFP feline vaccination guidelines for cats.

Note that “core” is not a permanent list. With its 2022 canine guidelines, AAHA moved the leptospirosis vaccine to core for most dogs in the US, having previously classed it as non-core — AAHA’s own announcement is the primary source, and the classification is regional rather than global. That single change is the argument for checking a live guideline rather than trusting anything, including this table, that was written on a fixed date.

Why does the paper folder fail?

Two reasons, and only one of them is obvious.

The obvious one is location. The folder lives at home; the emergency happens in a car park, on a walk, at a kennel, in a clinic you have never been to. A record you cannot reach is not a record.

The second is structure, and it is the one that quietly does more damage. A folder is append-only and unsorted. “When was the last lepto booster?” requires reading every sheet in it. “Has she ever reacted to a vaccine?” requires remembering that the reaction was written on the back of a discharge note from 2023. The paper is a pile of source documents, and a source document is not an answer. What a vet wants is the answer, in a form they can scan in seconds while doing four other things.

Photos of documents in a camera roll are the same failure wearing modern clothes. The information is technically present and practically unreachable, filed between thousands of unrelated pictures and a screenshot of a parking receipt.

What does a 20-second record actually require?

The real test is narrow. You are standing at a counter, someone in scrubs is waiting, and you have about twenty seconds before you start apologising. That test implies four constraints, and most apps fail at least one.

It has to work with no signal and no login. Veterinary waiting rooms are frequently concrete boxes with terrible reception, and the moment that ruins the twenty seconds is a login screen followed by a password reset email you cannot receive.

It has to produce one artifact, not fourteen. A single PDF with vaccinations, medications, weight, and history is a thing you can hand over, email ahead, or print. A camera roll is not.

It has to be answerable, not just searchable. “Next due” beats “here is the certificate.”

It has to keep the original. A structured record that has lost its source document cannot settle a dispute with a kennel or an insurer. Keep both: the parsed fields and the scan they came from.

Pawza is our attempt at exactly this shape. You photograph a vet document, Apple’s on-device Vision OCR reads the text, and on devices with Apple Intelligence an on-device model turns it into fields — vaccine, date given, date due, medication, dose, clinic — which you review and correct before anything is saved. It tracks weight as a trend rather than a number, holds the microchip number, the insurance policy and pet-passport records alongside the clinical history, schedules a local notification before each due date, and with Pro exports the whole file as one vet-visit PDF. There is no Pawza account and no Pawza server; records sit on the device in SwiftData with optional sync through your own iCloud. Our transparency page lists what every app declares, field by field.

The constraints are real. It is iPhone and iPad only, and the full AI auto-fill wants Apple Intelligence on iOS 26 or later — on older devices you get OCR-assisted entry and confirm more by hand. The PDF export is a Pro feature: free covers one pet, and Pro is $2.99/month, $19.99/year or $39.99 once with Family Sharing.

And here is the honest part, because it matters more than the pitch. PetDesk does something Pawza structurally cannot. It connects to participating veterinary clinics, so it can carry appointment booking and the reminders your clinic itself sends. Pawza cannot do that, and will never be able to, because a clinic integration needs a server to talk to and Pawza does not have one. If your vet uses PetDesk and you want to book through the app, use PetDesk. Plenty of owners run both: the clinic app for talking to the clinic, and a private record that survives switching vets.

The rest of the category divides along similar honest lines. 11pets is broader and cross-platform with provider collaboration. Medika and PetNoter both run on Android, which we do not. Pawprint, now Great Pet Care, built its reputation on fetching records directly from participating US clinics. VetKeep offers a conversational AI chat over your records, which requires the cloud that we deliberately do not have. Pick the trade you actually want.

TL;DR

• A complete record is twelve categories, not one folder: vaccinations, parasite prevention, medications, weight history, allergies and reactions, microchip plus registry, surgeries, chronic conditions, labs, insurance, diet, and clinic contacts.
• Different people ask for different slices. Emergency vets want meds, allergies, weight and diagnoses. Kennels and groomers want proof of vaccination, often given a set number of days before arrival. Insurers want invoices plus prior history.
• Core vs non-core is a risk category, not a schedule. WSAVA, AAHA and AAFP set the categories; your vet and local rabies law set the intervals — and the categories move, as canine leptospirosis did in AAHA’s 2022 canine guidelines.
• International travel is governed by the destination country. You need an official export health certificate from your government’s authority, not a summary you made yourself. Start months ahead.
• The record that counts is the one you can produce in twenty seconds with no signal and no login, as one document, with the original scan still attached.

The paper is fine. The problem is that the paper is at home, and your dog is here.