The Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network says software being used to allow swine veterinarians across Canada to share information on emerging swine disease trends offers a range of additional management options.
The Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network, a Canadian Swine Health Board initiative, enables swine veterinarians to share information on disease issues developing in their regions.
CSHIN project manager Dr. Egan Brockhoff explains the network is powered by an online Swine Database Systems software tool developed by swine veterinarians that has been in use for about seven years.
We had used this software previously for similar projects and we recognized that we wanted everybody using the same platform.
If everyone’s using the same platform for getting data in then when we get the data out we have much greater assurance that it’s reliable and quality data.
That was one of our primary considerations.
Secondary considerations, we wanted the tool to be simple and we wanted the tool to be mobile friendly so we used an online tool.
Third consideration is we really wanted something that would bring value to the veterinarians in other ways.
Maybe they need a new or different way to manage their medical records.
This tool would also allow them to manage their medical records including their diagnostics, including their prescriptions, including their export schedule and so on.
The goal was to provide a simple tool for health intelligence but, if they wanted to use additional resources, those resources were available to them and so increasing value to the practicing veterinarian and then passing that value on to the pork producer.
Dr. Brockhoff says the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network now has users across the country and, as users have become more used to entering data, we’ve seen more and more data coming into the system.
