How soon will I receive my dog’s lab results?

Depending on what test we run and if we do the lab in the veterinary clinic, I would argue to tell you between five and 10 minutes you'll have them back. And again, when we say lab results, we're talking about fecals, urine analysis, CBCs, chemistry, maybe a coag panel. Most clinics, including ours, has in-house equipment that allows for point of care blood work, such as that, or lab work, I should say. In the cases of those tests I just rambled off, I’ll have the results in 5-10 minutes. Some tests that have to be sent off, like phenobarbital, certain thyroid panels, ACTH, or various endocrine type panels that we're screening for, those likely have to be sent off to an outside lab. And that might take anywhere from one to maybe even two, three days to get back.

If we do them in the clinic, those tests would be the same day while you're still at your visit. And then, if there are some that we send out, it may be a day or two—that would be a typical turnaround for most routine lab work.

It's usually very quick. Some of it's done in-house in our laboratory, and we can have it done in minutes. Sometimes we send it out to external laboratories, but it will return in a few days.

How soon you receive results really depends on the type of test that we're running. There are many different types of tests, including some in-house laboratory tests that we might get back the same day, versus some lab tests that we might send out for review to a pathologist, which sometimes can take a few days or even a couple of weeks to get results back on.