Emergency Support to Emergency Report

State of the art reporting systems at the Southern Animal Emergency Centre are now allowing your primary care vet to receive better information faster. When it comes to the care of your pet across multiple facilities, this can be one of the critical contributing factors to a successful outcome.

Many owners are understandingly unaware of the amount of work away from the cage-side contributing to their pet’s recovery. One critical activity is the handover of your pet and accompanying medical information from the emergency centre to your primary care vet. An enormous amount of work goes into making reports comprehensive, relevant and useful to the vet who is to continue treatment. This is often your regular vet, who has not had the benefit of being up at 3am to learn first hand of the treatment your pet has undergone at your local emergency centre. Furthermore, a single omission or the unavailability of a key piece of information can take the shine off an otherwise textbook treatment and recovery.

Some months ago the Southern Animal Emergency Centre switched to a paperless reporting system able to compile reports in seconds from underlying and disparate information sources around the hospital.

The time critical nature of reporting demanded that emergency reports be ready to send at the time of discharge, so that the primary care vet was not left hanging for information when the pet arrived after a speedy transfer. This was balanced with the need to provide a well formatted and easy to read report format. The answer was to depart from the error-prone, time consuming and messy method of printing and faxing reports which had historically formed the backbone of much inter-hospital communication.

The result was a system that allowed not only faster and better presented textual information, but also the included a wealth of new information including visual diagnostics such CT scan slices, digital x-ray and endoscopy images along with colour coded laboratory results – all at the click of a mouse.

The cornerstone of this system was the integration of medical record databases and a new PiCture Archiving System (PACS) installed to keep pace with the ever advancing digital imaging capability of the Centre. The PACS allows for digital storage of CT images and digital x-ray images, as well as the capability to capture images from new digital imaging modalities as they become available.

If your pet is treated at the Southern Animal Emergency Centre, your primary care vet has the option to receive treatment reports in full colour by email, or by the traditional fax method. These reports can be continually updated to include information on new imaging, diagnostic and treatment modalities installed in the hospital.

If you would like to know more about emergency electronic reporting or you are a vet wishing to receive reports electronically, please contact the Southern Animal Emergency Centre on (03) 9532 5261.

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