How Visualized Lab Results Make All The Difference In The World
Death By Clicks
An organic search on a marketplace for a problem that has yet to be addressed, medical software interoperability populates the result of a new, up-and-coming solution; IVEE. A techie veterinarian seeks to improve communication with clientele regarding lab results and treatment plans.
Challenge
In order to provide the right care, let alone the best care, veterinarians have to examine multiple lab results, multiple patients files, and multiple metrics simultaneously. Each day they can spend up to 10 or 15 minutes sorting through patient records before an appointment. That time consists primarily of a motion to click or “thumb” through a series of records, known by many as “death by clicks”, to gain a full understanding of the patient’s previous medical history.
Wouldn’t it be great to have all the metrics together under one roof to understand them more easily? The challenge is:
1. Records are stored (very well we might add) in the practice’s choice of practice management system,
2. If the patient is transferred from another clinic the records transfer via a PDF attachment,
3. Notes about records are hand-written or written in shorthand or in some instances the record wasn’t filled out completely for any number of reasons
4. Combine all those dates and metrics together, and you have a giant spreadsheet that is full of information but no starting point for the organization.
Now imagine that there are multiple lab companies being used, each with its own standardization; this is the reality of this challenge.
Solution
Dr. Ken, Dr. Dan, & Dr. O’Leary all requested our help with a tool to easily visualize changes in lab metrics from test to test and metrics value over time. The goal? To be able to evaluate how a pet’s health is trending, whether it is progression or regression in the pet’s health based on their diagnosis and treatment. This visual aid would function as a tool when discussing treatment plans with pet parents, providing an unbiased visual representation for clients so that they might better understand the “why” behind the veterinarian’s treatment recommendations and more easily follow along with the veterinarians in monitoring the effectiveness of the treatment plan over time together.
Stored medical records and shared lab results display metrics that are unique to the system that stores them, so we took on the daunting task of mapping 6200 lines of lab result metrics and standardized each field. Rather than having three different metrics for each lab result, you have one. Make sense right?
Take the lab values of E,g K, K+, K++ = K, for example; these specific clinics had approximately 300 different fields of metrics but when standardized into one there were only about 75. For ONE of these clinics, we went from 6,200 lines of metrics to 530 variations to down to 316 lines of standardized metrics.
Each clinic requested, for the sake of usefulness of the IVEE tool, to map lab results under one single line chart so they could quickly understand results and variances and use that to communicate with pet parents. E.g.: Dr. Daniel Slovis, Lake Anna uses IDEXX, Antech, and in-house lab results. Each displays information well, but differently. We brought all the results together, which allowed us to pull them onto the requested singular line chart. How do we do it? Our proprietary mapping allows us to uniquely identify each system that the information comes from, then populates said information back into the requested chart.
Results
Each clinic is now able to successfully review lab results (regardless of which lab the tests are performed at coming from) in a singular view that is also presented as a line chart. This enables the veterinarians to detect subtle differences in lab work earlier and review positive or negative outcomes in patient health and treatment plans as they occur.
The clinics that continually use the IVEE dashboards with their clients are seeing an increase in understanding of treatment plans and future care of their pets. Thus, leading the clinic on a successful path of increased opt-in rates for treatment plans and saving time on convincing clients to pursue certain diagnostics, treatments, and follow-up therapies. Long run, these clinics will learn from the identified anomalies and variances to adjust their suggested treatment plans accordingly, ensuring that more pet health goals are reached. YAY!!
