Many users may not realise that OVPMS is increasingly able to integrate with a number of 3rd party systems/products. I am writing this post to highlight our experiences with various systems that integrate with OVPMS.

Just to give some background. We operate a 24 hour emergency & specialist centre in Sydney. We are a fairly small clinic with about 7FTE vets. My belief is the most common piece of equipment anyone uses is our PMS and this is a massive area for efficiency gains in our business.

We use an electronic charting system called SmartFlowSheet in our clinic. This is a sophisticated replacement for paper charts. We started using it because I was never a fan of paper and the issues that came with paper charts. Issues we had were illegible orders, mistakes because of illegible orders, difficulty changing charts once they had been created, difficulty managing charts with patients in hospital for multiple days (easy to loose), the constant hunt for charts that had been moved off cages, time wasted scanning/uploading charts into OVPMS, etc etc etc. SmartFlow is an electronic chart that synchronises across iPads and a web application. Thus we can access our charts for all in patients from any iPad or computer in the clinic (or elsewhere!). We have pre-made templates for different procedures/conditions (e.g. vomiting/diarrhoea dogs, FLUTD cats, TPLO surgeries).

One of our efficiency issues was that each time a patient was admitted to hospital a nurse would need to go and copy a bunch of information from OVPMS to SmartFlow to create a new chart. On discharge the patient charts were emailed to an email address and an admin assistant would need to attach each individually into OVPMS (less work than scanning - but still).

An integration was created with the sponsorship of Advanced Vetcare in Melbourne, SmartFlowSheet and us (Eastside Vets in Sydney). We are now in a situation where when we transfer a patient (in OVPMS) into our hospital worklist a new chart is automatically created in SmartFlow! All we do is select the template and start time of the treatments and we are off and running. When we discharge a patient, OVPMS imports the hospital charts automatically. So we don’t have to manually attach anything. I can’t imagine going into our next xmas/NYE without this as it creates a far more seamless workflow from admission to chart creation to discharge.

We obviously like SmartFlow as a stand alone system. It works fantastically and has brought a bunch of benefits to our clinic (including increased efficiency of nursing for those $$ minded people). However since we had the integration turned on last month it has improved our hospital workflow massively. There is no delay between admission and chart creation now and nurses spend much less time doing data entry to create new charts or attach completed charts back into OVPMS.

The next phase of integration will allow us to charge items from SmartFlowSheet to OVPMS. So when a nurse carries out a treatment (for example does a PCV/TPP or changes a bandage or changes an IV catheter or does a blood pressure measurement) and records this on the chart in SmartFlow the charges will automatically be pushed to OVPMS. Again, this will improve charge capture and efficiency (as vets and nurses will need to spend less time manually charging items). If you are considering using this system I would urge you to help fund this further integration as it will certainly improve charge capture.

Please note. This is not a paid advertisement. Our only involvement with these systems is we use them. However I believe there is a lack of awareness that some of these integrations with OVPMS exist and also what they can bring to practices.