Happy Partnerships

A happy coincidence

An advisor to a small female tech company, traveling with his daughter and her pup, a founder of a fleet of mobile veterinarians, and a chance encounter at an airport sets the stage for this study. 

Goals? Enable agnostic and interoperable connectedness amongst veterinary clinics and their clients. Outcomes? Connecting and sharing as much information as possible about the health of an animal and the clinic that provides the care to enhance the quality of care for any animal.

Challenge

There’s no question about it: a mobile clinic has to have tools that are cloud-based and mobile. A mobile fleet spends a lot of their time--you guessed it--commuting. A simple fact to understand is that understanding patient history is even more important to do as quickly as possible. Time is of the essence. Thumbing through a bunch of paper records or clicking incessantly through digital files creates unnecessary stress in the life of any veterinarian. Our mobile fleet has a sophisticated cloud-based practice management system (PiMS) and a great internal application, but insights were still difficult to decipher.

They have to put in extra effort to ensure their medical records are up-to-date with the primary care physicians to provide the best care for these more precise cases.  In addition, their unique records don’t transfer well to the average “general practice” PiMS, nor are either party’s records automatically updated based on visits between each other.  Making it very difficult to keep an accurate record of the animal with the animal.

Leaving us all to wonder?
How do they make sure all of an animal’s records of care are being kept with the animal? And how do veterinarians go about finding them without spending 15+ minutes doing so?

Solution

Our partnership really blossomed the more we discussed siloed animal medical records. How could a mobile franchise outpace traditional veterinary care with technology? Expand their mobile franchise with the use of their own data? With the goal being to return their data to them in a singular view with easily discernible insights, we knew we first had to start with their data.

How? The work commenced with the introduction to their PiMS. The system is newer with limited access to API so we had the challenge to combine the available API data with a CSV “data dump” (think about those outrageously long spreadsheets that seem to have no end), as well as including the historical records that are attached to the PiMS as imported PDFs. While this information adds complexity to data aggregation, it proves worth the effort because it helps create a truly complete medical history. You can read more about how we really feel about PDFs here.

The work of mapping current PiMS information, internal information and historical records bloomed beautifully. We began our proprietary mapping of any PIMS that came with an animal record. We are able to identify, via PDF, which system the attached record comes from. From there we standardize the information and offer it back to the veterinarian and management team as operational intelligence tools driven by animal health records.

For these mobile clinics; each veterinarian is considered its own business or clinic within the franchise model, with 9 clinics under one roof. The growth of our clinic-to-clinic view within a consolidated group of veterinary hospitals, and keeping information separate but under the same roof is based on this mobile franchise. The goal is for owners and key stakeholders to be able to gain insights on individual veterinary care for animals as a mobile clinic and help with marketing, and supply chain automation such as inventory, travel, and patient onboarding.

Results

The mobile clinic team has been using our portal for almost a year now. They began by using our telehealth services and dynamic visualization dashboards. They have one technician/receptionist that works virtually with multiple clinics. She can find and send patient records using the cloud-based portal anytime and anywhere. Utilizing the insights of the visualized medical records. They were able to quickly see that mobile visits were benefiting anxiety-ridden pets. Our analysis of the mobile visits revealed that canine/feline heart rate was down by as much as 10 beats per minute (BPM).

Technician Liz, “it was cool to see how cats’ heart rates dropped during house call visits compared to their heart rates in a regular clinic.”

— Betsy Banks Saul, Petfinder, & the Petfinder Foundation, CEO, Co-founder Heal House Call Veterinarian, 911FosterPets

“A good strategic partner provides value to your stakeholders - that’s easy to find. A great strategic partner becomes invested in your stakeholder’s happiness. The IVEE team innately understands the nuanced difference & combines that with an open, nimble, & responsive spirit that bodes well for our industry. Our partners say as much about us as our product does & I’m quite proud of the innovative women of IVEE.”

The Heal House Call team uses the visual medical records to observe pet data in one place and note patterns with a minimum time between appointments. The information that they gain through the use of the insights that come along with the visual records helps them to market appropriately to clientele and increase clinical health from an administrative perspective while achieving their ultimate goal of happy pets, happy people.