VCPR and Telemedicine Rules in North Dakota

North Dakota's route to establishing the relationship is in-person only — there is no remote alternative — and the statute is unusually explicit about that word.

A veterinarian-client-patient relationship exists only once the veterinarian is personally acquainted with the keeping and care of the patient through a medically appropriate and timely in-person examination of the patient, or a timely in-person visit to the premises where the patient is managed or resides.

Both branches of that sentence carry the word in-person, so neither a synchronous video exam nor any other remote contact can substitute for either route.

For a practice writing an intake workflow, that means the file has to show which in-person event, an exam or a premises visit, actually happened before anyone treats the record as open.

The statute closes the loop twice.

Subsection (5) of the VCPR section states flatly that a veterinarian-client-patient relationship may not be established solely through veterinary telemedicine, and the telemedicine-specific section restates the same in-person requirement as a precondition, requiring that in-person exam or premises visit happen before the provision of veterinary telemedicine services at all.

Read together, telemedicine cannot substitute for the in-person contact and cannot even begin until that contact has already occurred.

That forecloses a direct-to-consumer model where a client's only contact with the practice is a video call.

North Dakota's bar on telemedicine is written specifically at establishment — subsection (5) and the telemedicine section both restrict how the relationship begins, and neither imposes a modality condition on what follows.

That is not the same as saying no duties remain: once established, the veterinarian must stay reasonably available for follow-up care, provide oversight of patient treatment, keep records under rules the board promulgates, and maintain the relationship when seeking consultation.

None of those duties turns on contact method, so nothing on their face stops a veterinarian from using telemedicine to meet them — the statute simply never says so in terms, and the board's own recordkeeping rules under subsection (4) have not been reviewed for this page.

Subsection (10) separately adds that the relationship may extend to all veterinarians within the same practice who have access to the patient's records, so once one veterinarian has done the in-person exam or premises visit, colleagues at that same practice share the established relationship.

North Dakota exempts two things from the VCPR requirement entirely, and shields a third from penalty without removing the requirement itself.

Teleadvice and teletriage need no prior relationship at all: the provision of either by a veterinarian does not require prior establishment of a veterinarian-client-patient relationship, and a veterinary technician may perform both without instructions from a veterinarian.

Separately, and outside the telemedicine section altogether, a veterinarian who in good faith renders or attempts to render emergency care may not be subject to penalty based solely on the inability to establish a veterinarian-client-patient relationship — a penalty shield, not an exemption from needing a VCPR.

The chapter's definitions keep teleadvice and teletriage narrow — teleadvice is health information, opinion or guidance that is not specific to a particular animal and not intended to diagnose, prognose or treat, and teletriage is electronic communication with the client to determine urgency and the need for immediate referral to a veterinarian.

Neither reaches a patient-specific diagnosis, prescription or treatment plan, which is what the in-person requirement above is protecting.

Prescribing generally requires a veterinarian-client-patient relationship, but the chapter carves out a narrow dispensing exception for a veterinarian who does not have one with that particular patient.

It applies only where the drug was prescribed by a veterinarian or foreign practitioner who does have an established relationship with the patient, that prescriber has an inadequate supply or dispensing would interrupt a therapeutic regimen or cause the animal to suffer, the dispensing veterinarian verifies the prescription with the prescriber, and the dispensing veterinarian is not presumptively aware of any disciplinary action against them.

The exception is unavailable for a controlled substance at all — the statute opens the subsection with "other than a controlled substance," so a practice covering for a colleague on a controlled-substance refill cannot use this route regardless of how the other four conditions come out.

The current sections took effect August 1, 2025, under Senate Bill No. 2129 (S.L. 2025, ch. 397).

The act created §§ 43-29-12.2 and 43-29-20 as new sections of chapter 43-29 — the VCPR requirements and the telemedicine-specific rules did not exist as their own sections before this act — and separately amended subsection 2 of the existing dispensing-exception section, § 43-29-19.

Any guidance, vendor summary, or internal policy predating August 2025 should be checked against the current text before being relied on.

An older bill number, ND HB1151, is sometimes miscited in connection with North Dakota veterinary telehealth.

HB1151 is about cell-cultured protein, not veterinary telemedicine, and has no bearing on the VCPR or telemedicine rules described here.

The enactment that actually governs this page's content is Senate Bill No. 2129, S.L. 2025, ch. 397, effective August 1, 2025 — check that citation, not HB1151, before relying on anything described as North Dakota's telehealth bill.