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Background

Veterinary clinical surveillance has taken on renewed interest in recent years. It has a role in early detection of exotic diseases and also better describing the more common, insidious and costly endemic diseases. VetPAD is the both the tool to capture veterinary practitioner diagnosed animal disease events and the concept behind it.

Researches at the Massey University EpiCentre have been reviewing the role of various sources of veterinary surveillance data and the relative strengths of each. At one extreme are farmers who see cases of disease with the greatest frequency. As a source of disease information they have great coverage, but lack the diagnostic sensitivity and credibility to provide information suitable for international agencies. At the other extreme are veterinary diagnostic laboratories who have the diagnostic sensitivity to be a credible source of information, but suffer from a biased and relatively small sample size from which to draw conclusions.

In the middle between these two extremes are veterinary clinical practitioners. Research by Massey University EpiCentre and others have shown, high rates of contact between veterinary practitioners and farmer clients and their animals. This puts veterinary practitioners at the forefront of any new initiatives to monitor disease trends.

Until now capturing veterinary clinical diagnoses has been problematic. The diagnosis if it is recorded at all may be hand written in a diary or advice note to the farmer. Even if it has been recorded on the billing records and these are computerised, the problems do not end there as the practice management software may not have an export function and if it does and the data can be collated for analysis there is a lack of consistency between veterinarians in recording diagnoses.

We realised early on, that if we wished to capture veterinary clinical diagnoses in New Zealand, we would need to do so in a manner which supported the practitioner rather than burdened them with a bureaucratic requirement. The VetPAD software was designed with this in mind, by a former practitioner and dairy farmer. It is designed to be a total billing and disease recording system. Data from it can then be either manually entered into the practice management system or imported from the xml file which can be created at the click of a button.