Walk into CareVet of Shoreline in Clinton, Connecticut, and you are in a practice that was formerly Shoreline Animal Hospital, one that has served the town for years. That local continuity is deliberate. CareVet partners with independent hospitals and lets them keep their clinical autonomy. Repeat that across 220+ hospitals in 35+ states, though, and a harder question appears: how do thousands of team members, working in hospitals with their own names and histories, come to feel part of one organization?
<sprscript-green>The Challenge<sprscript-green>
Hundreds of hospitals, very little shared connection
CareVet's operating model is built on investing in the people who deliver care. As the network grew to 220+ hospitals, 575+ veterinarians and 3,000+ team members, that commitment became harder to feel on the ground. Most staff experienced CareVet through their own clinic. Few had any sense of the colleagues doing the same work in other states, or of how their daily work connected to the company's wider vision.
Internal communication added to the problem. Updates moved through a mix of messaging tools that carried information but did little to connect people. There was no single place where a technician in one state could see what a team elsewhere was celebrating, or where company news reached every hospital in the same way.
CareVet set out to change that. The goal was to give team members a reason to connect beyond their own hospital, tie them more closely to the company's direction, and replace the patchwork of messaging tools with one app of its own.
<sprscript-green>Why social.plus<sprscript-green>
Familiar engagement mechanics for frontline teams
CareVet's team members spend their days with patients and pet parents, not at a desk. An app built for them had to feel instantly familiar and work on mobile as well as on the web. It also had to stay private to CareVet employees and carry CareVet's own brand, rather than sending staff to a public platform.
With social.plus, CareVet could add Stories, a social feed and chat as infrastructure rather than building and maintaining them in-house. That left the team free to focus on what is specific to CareVet: the KPIs, schedules, resources and recognition that make the app useful day to day.
<sprscript-green>Implementation<sprscript-green>
Fetch Connect, one app for the whole network
CareVet built Fetch Connect on the social.plus TypeScript SDK with the React Native UIKit, launching across mobile and web. Three social.plus capabilities sit at the core of the experience. Stories live on the app's Dashboard, where team members post photos and videos and react to their colleagues' moments. <strong>A social feed</strong> surfaces updates from their own hospital and from across the network. Chat replaces the messaging tools teams previously relied on.
Around these, CareVet built the features specific to its operations: Monthly KPIs, Schedule, Resources, News and Updates, and Boops, CareVet's way for team members to recognize one another. Because users never leave Fetch Connect, the experience carries CareVet's brand end to end, and the engagement data generated inside the app stays with CareVet.
<sprscript-green>The Results<sprscript-green>
A steady base of monthly active team members
Fetch Connect has settled into consistent use. In June 2026 the app reached 584 monthly active users, its strongest month of the year, coinciding with its largest single-month intake of new users. Through the summer of 2026, monthly activity held steady at roughly 490 to 580 team members.
<sprscript-green>What's Next<sprscript-green>
Redesigning News and extending the rollout
CareVet is now redesigning the News section of Fetch Connect and extending access beyond 600 users, bringing more of the network's 3,000+ team members into the same shared space. A recent update that lets team members send Boops to colleagues at any CareVet hospital points in the same direction: recognition and connection that reach past any single clinic.