Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal Practice using OpenVPMS?
Hi there,
We are currently considering OpenVPMS, amongst other software to help manage our practice. I notice that it is not possible to have more than one stock location per location. Vets generally have products in their car, which at the minute have no stock control. My idea would be to create each vet his/her own login, and create a new Practice Location per vet, and then a Stock Location per Practice Location- along with the Practice clinics as their own Practice Locations, with their own individual Stock Location also. Is this the best way to deploy OpenVPMS?
We have vets that go out on Large Animal calls. It would take too much time to record these animals in OpenVPMS, yet we need to have a central system to manage client's Small Animal records with their account. Is this possible? Our plan would be to have vets record their schedule in the system at the end of the day, and generate the invoices themselves, so everything neatly populates on the database.
In terms of schedule and work lists- Ideally, we would like all staff to be able to see where products are in stock. We would also like to use a drop down and see what is going on over the practice, so each vet would have his/her own work list/schedule for calls, plus a work list/schedule for Surgery and Consults in each clinic. Is this the best way to go about this?
Also, we have to record all batch numbers of drugs. Is it possible to add a field to a product (beside Expiry Date for example), to record this? This would need to be included in any invoice, and thus available for future reference.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
The following is a set of responses - but please treat them as input rather than the final answers.
1. Practice locations. I see no downside in each mobile vet having their own practice location with each one having their own stock location. You can restrict the practice locations available to each user so Vet1 can be limited to his Vet1 location and the main clinic, and cannot select Vet2 as a practice location. On the stock control side, you can use the stock transfer facility to 'restock' the cards. [You probably want to do all the re-ordering of stock into the main store rather than reordering from suppliers for each car's stock.]
2. Large Animals/ Small Animals. I am afraid that I do not understand the problem. If you do not want to track large animal activity in detail, then when visiting Farmer Bloggs to fix his horse, you could just record the fact that you visited Farmer Bloggs, and invoice for the visit without mentioning the fact that it was Dobbin who got attended to. [This is possible, because although you must specify the customer for an appointment (or invoice) you need not specify the patient.]
However, if you visit Farmer Bloggs to fix his cat, then you can happily keep full records of Fluffy's treatment.
3. Schedules and Work Lists. I think that the system is flexible enough to do what you want. remember that there are both schedule views and worklist views. These specify what schedule/worklists are to be included in the views. We run schedules for each vet (as well as an 'Any Vet' schedule for the case where the appointment is non-vet specific). The house-call vet (we have only one) has a view which includes his customer visits and the hospital and surgery schedules so that he can see when to slot his patients into the hospital/surgery.
3A. 'see where products are in stock' The Stock Locations tab of the Medication and Merchandise view screens list the stock at each location. The 'show me all stock at location xxx' is done via a report.
4. Batch Numbers. Without enhancing the system, this can be handled by having multiple product entries for the items that have batch numbers. Each product has both a name and a printed-name (which is shown on the printed invoice. Hence you can have two different products, named 'Rabies Batch 123456' and 'Rabies Batch 345678' both with the printed name 'Merial Rabisin-R Rabies (Inactivated)'.
Simply providing a field to hold the batch number is not the real answer. Or rather it would be if one could guarrantee that all stocks of batch 123456 were used up before 345678 was put into use. In reality there will be time when the stock is a mix of the two batches.
General: If you have not found it yet, the Context Sensitive Help (see http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.7/topics) should be helpful to you. Its Concepts sections provide information on the various facilities and features.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
Hi Tim,
Many thanks for your detailed reply. Since my last post, I have looked through the documentation and have learned a lot about OpenVPMS.
All the above is what I guessed myself, and I very much appreciate your help.
We have to make sure all batch numbers are keep recorded in some way. What I need is a batch number to be entered, along with the Expiry Date (In with the prescription). In reality due to the way the business is run, insuring a certain batch is used before another just isn't feasible for us. How could I add a field in the Prescription screen, that would include the batch number manually entered on the label, and on the invoice if entered?
Many farmers require the batch numbers for their records (dairy), and may request invoices we have on record, so recording batch numbers is important for us.
Of course we could include it with the Note, but that is a bit messy.
Thanks in advance
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
You could add a Batch Number field to the Patient Medication archetype. You would need to change the Jasper Reports Label template to include this field in the printed label.
E.g. Change act.patientMedication.adl to include:
<node name="batch" displayName="Batch Number" path="/details/batch" type="java.lang.String" minCardinality="1" maxLength="20"/>
Each time the medication is dispensed, the batch would be entered.
If the batch number is optional, set minCardinality="0".
Regards,
-Tim A
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
Worked a treat - Cheers
Thanks once again for all your help.
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
Gor (or should it be George? ;-) - Tim A's note below indicates how flexible the system is. See http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.7/admin/archetype for further information. Note that since you want the batch number appearing on the invoice, then you will also need to tweak the invoice (and perhaps credit note) document templates so that the batch numbers get displayed. [See http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.7/reference/reportsForms for some background information.]
Note that adjusting/creating reports using JasperSoft's iReports is not an 'any idiot can do it' task, but also it does not require a computer science degree. Its probably akin to writing VBA code to do sexy things in Excel spreadsheets. If you don't have some familiarity with programming, then if you can't convince your retired programmer father-in-law or other friend/relative to do the work, there are a number of implementors who do this sort of work.
Regards, Tim G [the retired father-in-law]
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
Hi Tim,
I have quite in an interest and knowledge in IT ( in particular Web Development etc), and iReports is nothing new to me. I have actually been fiddling around with some templates using it, and the batch feature works just as I expected. I have never worked with OpenVPMS until now, and so VPMS is new to me.
Like you describe, it appears the software is quite flexible in meeting each practice's needs, which is unheard of with other software. We are still looking at other software [I can almost hear you say "Traitor!"].
In terms of deployment if we are to go ahead, it would be something we would have to plan in advance, have training days and so on for staff, since we are basically using no software for animal records (Yeah I know!). Copying clients data would need to be done over time, as each client comes just to import it in to the system then, rather then all at once, with the use of Kettle to migrate customer accounts from our accounts software to OpenVPMS. Any recommendations from any previous deployments in a similar situation as us would be greatly welcomed in any case. I have found a lot of suggestions from searching the forum.
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
I have been working for the last 18 months on the conversion of the RxWorks system used for the last 10 years by my son and daughter-in-law , and we just decided that 6Jan2014 is the cutover date. My conversion suite (using Kettle can convert the system in about 3.5 hours). One of the biggest problems has been doing the data cleanup. RxWork is very sloppy, OpenVPMS very tight, and so there is a lot of processing to clean up for example, the 10 different ways that Shih Tzu has been spelt. However Kettle is a neat tool for doing this.
If you do want to bring forward the paper patient records, then one way would be to scan then and hold them as images against the patient rather than keying in historical data.
I am afraid that I have worked on no other deployments other than this one, and others will be better placed to provide tips on how best to convert from a 'no real practice management system'.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Whats the best way to manage a Small and Large Animal ...
Just a quick not regarding LARGE animals - how I would do it
Client - Patient 1(Dog aka Fluffy) recorded as normal
- Patient 2(Cattle Herd - Breeders for example) recorded as a Herd
- Patient 3(Stud Bull) recorded as Normal
So for high cost intensively manage animals you can record them individually for Treatment to say a herd of dairy cattle you treat as a herd. and record details under that patient...you should NOT add treatments/invoices for prescriptions with NO patient. (it breaks most state laws). But you can have a herd of animals
There is potential to expand the patient archetype here or add an additional archetype that is added for herds. It might have other nodes more applicable to the herd than the individual.
keep in mind that as part of major upgrades the archetypes are normally reloaded. which will erase any modified archetypes you have added. so remember to remodify them or add the modified one to the upgrade folder.
Ben