Did you know that WRMD is the largest online wildlife rehabilitation community in the world, connecting 984 organizations in 50 US states and 25 countries? Since 2012 WRMD users have admitted over 2.2 MILLION patients! Our incredible community of users grows larger every year and we need your help.
One of the most remarkable things about WRMD is that it’s FREE. We rely on our users and partners to support our efforts. We see this as a community project and without them we could not continue. WRMD doesn’t sell ad space or any user data. This means that we depend on our supporters to keep WRMD free and constantly improving.
We’re writing today to ask for your support to help keep WRMD awesome and free. Our dedication to our users empowers them to save hundreds-of-thousands of injured and orphaned wildlife each year and collect irreplaceable wildlife epidemiological data. WRMD was developed to help wildlife rehabilitators save lives, but it does a lot more than that. In 2021 we have made some truly remarkable milestones:
The 2,000,000th patient (an Northern Mockingbird from Davis California) was admitted!
With the release of the Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System we are now monitoring for wildlife health events.
We unveiled a brand new Knowledge Base to help our users find answers to solve problems on their own.
Can you help us? Please consider making a monthly donation to WRMD. It will be you, your patients and wildlife rehabilitators across the world that will benefit!
Figure 1 from the study indicates locations of cases (small blue dots) in California presenting to wildlife rehabilitation organizations (bigger blue dots) participating in the Wildlife Mortality and Mortality Event Alert System from 2013-2018. Red areas indicate a high kernel density of cases. (Proceedings from the Royal Society B)
We are incredibly excited to announce the publication of our first research paper. Over the past few years we have been working with Dr Terra Kelly and Dr Pranav Pandit from the UC Davis One Health Institute to develop The Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System (WMMEAS).
The Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System is described in a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Currently we are in the process of developing a more robust version of the WMMEAS that will not only allow users to define their own target searches but will also alert WRMD users about unusual patterns of illness and death for their patients. Stay tuned because we have some big things coming!
At Wildlife Rehabilitation MD, ensuring the privacy and security of our users and their data is our top priority. Unfortunately our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions have not been kept up-to-date with our growth and applicable privacy laws. Today we are writing to let you know that we are updating our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. These changes will go into effect on May 10, 2021.
We Want to Emphasize That:
Wildlife Rehabilitation MD does not sell our users’ data.
Wildlife Rehabilitation MD has never sold user data in the past and has no intention of selling users’ data going forward.
Wildlife Rehabilitation MD complies with all applicable privacy laws, rules, and regulations in the jurisdictions within which it operates, including the GDPR and the CCPA.
Updates to the Wildlife Rehabilitation MD Privacy Policy and Terms and Services
Wildlife Rehabilitation MD takes its users’ privacy extremely seriously. Wildlife Rehabilitation MD collects only the data from individuals using the Wildlife Rehabilitation MD platform required to provide the service and ensure it is delivered effectively under a wide variety of settings in which our users may be operating. This data includes basic technical information, such as the user’s IP address, OS details, and device details. Wildlife Rehabilitation MD has implemented safeguards to protect our users’ privacy, which includes robust and validated controls to prevent unauthorized access to any content that users share during the normal use of Wildlife Rehabilitation MD.
Importantly, Wildlife Rehabilitation MD does not mine user data or sell user data of any kind to anyone.
More transparency and control over how we share your data with business partners.
We shortened and reorganized the Privacy Policy. For example, we consolidated information for users in certain jurisdictions (e.g. users who reside outside of the United States and residents of California).
We updated our United States arbitration agreement.
Updated our privacy policy to ensure compliance with GDPR and CCPA and clarify roles and responsibilities with respect to your data.
We added a Cookies Policy to make it clear how we use cookies and how you may disable cookies if you wish.
Our Commitment
As always, we will continue to monitor and evolve our approach to privacy to ensure we are doing the right thing for our users. We stand by our commitment to protecting the privacy of our customers’ data, and we consider privacy to be a core part of our company values — to care for our community, our customers, our team, and our company.
Over the past 24hrs one of WRMDs servers was experiencing critical server errors and caused WRMD to crash. First and foremost, this is embarrassing and we sincerely apologize for the disruption. Secondly, there has no loss of any patient data (just a loss of time).
The errors were are result of extremely high server activity caused by a spike in WRMD traffic and report generation. We have taken many steps over the past few hours to rectify the issues and feel confident they wont occur again; but if they do, we are closely monitoring the servers and will catch any issues before they become critical again.
On Saturday March 27 at 12:15 am PST we will be performing maintenance on the servers that Wildlife Rehabilitation MD (WRMD) is hosted on. This maintenance is being performed to update the code base and database architecture and will cause a brief downtime. Users should avoid using Wildlife Rehabilitation MD(WRMD) between Saturday March 27 at 12:15 am and 1:00 am PST or you may experience unexpected behavior from the site.
As always, if you have any questions, please contact our support team. [email protected]
We’re writing today to ask for your support to help keep WRMD awesome. WRMD was developed to help wildlife rehabilitators save lives, but it does a lot more than that, and it just keeps getting better.
We would like to ask you to take a few minutes to bask in the awesomeness of WRMD and think about how much it has helped you, your organization, and the wildlife in your care. We’re also asking that you make a donation if you can, so we can keep up our important work. Ok, prepare to bask.
Since WRMD officially launched in 2012, 793 organizations in 48 US states and 22 countries have signed up and use the database, and over 1.8 MILLION patients have been admitted.
In addition to those tremendous accomplishments, we have developed a version of WRMD for the Oiled Wildlife Care Network in California (called O-WRMD) for use during oil spills to enable better care of large numbers of patients. Another project WRMD is very proud of is the Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System that is currently being used as a wildlife surveillance tool in California in conjunction with the One Health Institute at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and the Department of California Fish and Wildlife.
Over the last few years the WRMD team has also been busy adding new features including a Hotline extension that allows you to log your communications with the public as well as track the progress of an incident’s continued communications. Not only can you search callers to see if they are repeat offenders but you can also quickly identify calls that may be about the same incident.
Here are just a few of the ways that WRMD is changing the way wildlife rehabilitators work.
WRMD Helps the Patients In Your Care
Review patient records to see what treatments were effective
Provides access to the database from anywhere
Enables collaboration and communication with caretakers
Scheduled rechecks helps ensure patients don’t fall through the cracks
WRMD Helps You Save Time and Resources
Saves valuable time and resources by no longer needing to chase around paper records
Provides effective and efficient ways to organize rechecks and medications
Year-end reports can be generated with the click of a button
WRMD Elevates the Profession of Wildlife Rehabilitation
Rich and insightful analytics can be used to learn about who, where and why patients are admitted
The new automatic Circumstances of Admission tagging provides a powerful vision of why patients are admitted, so you can better target your outreach
The Expenses extension records daily expenses for each of your patients and helps calculate the cost of care for each patient or each type of expenditure (like medications)
In addition to all of that awesomeness, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Did you know that most of the WRMD work has been done by just two incredible people?
If you’ve ever met WRMD co-founders Devin and Rachel, you probably already know that they work tirelessly on WRMD, making updates and improvements based on what users are asking for, several times a year for free. They keep track of every suggestion and develop new features based on what people are asking for. They even do all of the customer support themselves.
One of the most remarkable things about WRMD is that it’s FREE. Not only is it free for anyone, but the WRMD site doesn’t sell ad space to pay for this service and they don’t do anything weird like sell your information or data. This means that they depend on their users to keep WRMD going and constantly improving.
Think about how much you would pay if you had to build your own WRMD. What do you think would be fair and affordable? Please consider making a monthly donation to WRMD in that amount or consider adding it together for a yearly donation. It will be you and the patients in your care that will benefit!
Thanks so much, – The Wild Neighbors Database Project Board of Directors
For several years, Devin and Rachel have been working with OWCN to modify WRMD for use with oil spills, and this year, the Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Medical Database (OWRMD) made its big debut. So far, OWRMD has been used for two single-animal spills, and the recent Cuyama River Incident. The very first spill patient input was a Bell’s Sparrow. Cuyama was the first “big” test of the system…
It’s been an honor and a pleasure to work with the Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN) over the past several years. OWRMD has developed into an amazing program that advances the care and documentation of California’s oiled wildlife.
A few weeks ago we introduced the Circumstances Of Admission field to help you tag your patients with any and all reasons the patient was admitted to your hospital. The reception for this field has been very positive and we thank you for your feed back. However there are still two items we want to address:
How do you tag patients with what’s clinically abnormal?
What if you want to use tags that are not available?
Diagnostic Classification Terminology
Very soon we will be adding two new classification tagging fields: Clinical Classifications and Categorization Of Clinical Signs. The fields will help you tag your patients with the abnormal physical exam findings by body system and what caused the abnormal physical exam findings.
So there will be 3 classification categories:
Circumstances of Admission (ex: Cat interaction, Vehicle collision, …) — Why did the rescuer bring me this animal?
Clinical Classifications (ex: Physical injury, Neurologic disease, …) — What are the physical exam findings by body system?
Categorization Of Clinical Signs (ex: Trauma, External parasites, …) — What caused the abnormal physical exam findings (Clinical Classifications)?
The Clinical Classifications and Categorization Of Clinical Signs fields can be found with the Diagnosis field.
Reminder: If you want to use the Classification Tagging fields, go to Settings and choose Classification Tagging under the WRMD settings box. From the Classification Tagging settings page you can activate these new fields.
As of the date of this blog post, the Clinical Classifications and Categorization Of Clinical Signs fields DO NOT have an automatic tagging feature like the Circumstances Of Admission field does. In the future we will add that feature.
Additionally, if you want to see a list of all the terms for each category and their hierarchical organization, you can view that on the Classification Tagging settings page. We are working on a list of each terms definition that will be made available from the Classification Tagging settings page as well.
Custom Terms
The terms in each category are meant to encompass, at a baseline level, the most common situations encountered in wildlife rehabilitation. For example, the Clinical Classifications category only classifies to the body systems, not to each individual organ or body part. You may use the terms in the classification tagging fields as-is or you may now also add custom terms for specific classifications that your hospital encounters. Your custom terms must be assigned to an existing root or leaf node of the terminology hierarchy. For example, you could use the Circumstances of Admission term “Cat interaction” or add the custom term “Feral cat” under Cat interaction in order to track that detail.
That’s It!
We hope you enjoy the new fields and are having a safe year!
With the release of the new Circumstances of Admission field we are very excited to also release a completely updated Analytics section. The older analytics section was nice but frankly kind-of rigid. It didn’t allow users to modify or tweak the graphs in order to see the information they wanted. In the updated Analytics section, all that changes. Our motivation for a new Analytics section was to answer the question:
“Can the analytics be flexible enough to allow users to discover answers to their own questions?”
ps: we think the answer is yes
The Five Ws
The Analytics section has been organized around the Five Ws (Who, What, Where, When and Why). Additionally, all the filters that you can apply are designed to adjust the Five Ws so that you can narrow down the data into only what you want.
Patients (Who)
The Patients sections is all about who your patients are. Such as, what are your most prevalent patients by common name, how many patients were in your care, how many species have been admitted and a whole lot more. There are pages summarizing your patients by many different taxa categories such as, common name, taxonomic class, biological group and endemic status. There are also pages summarizing your patients by many demographic and health indicators such as age, sex, attitude, body condition, dehydration and mucus membranes. The details of each category can be viewed to see their changes in over time. There is also a taxonomy tree map to visualize your patients grouped by their taxonomic ranks.
Origin (Where)
The Origin section is all about where your patients are found at. You can see the most prevalent cities and states you receive patients from and there is now a map page that plots where your patients are found at. The map will cluster patients together within a close geographic area to help you visualize groups.
Circumstances of Admission (Why)
Perhaps the most exciting section is Circumstances of Admission; ie why are your patients brought to your hospital. There is an overview of your patients most frequent circumstances of admission and all your circumstances of admission grouped by their the root circumstance. You can also see the totals of each circumstance of admission as well as the percent of each circumstance of admission compared to each other. And of course, circumstances of admission over time to illustrate their fluctuations seasonally. And, after popular request, there is now a survival rate for each circumstance of admission including their first 24 hours of care compared to after the first 24 hours.
Disposition (What)
The disposition section is about what happened to your patients at the end of their care. There’s an overview page with the totals of each disposition as well as graphs illustrating when each disposition occurred. There are also specific graphs for released and transferred patients, include the type of release (or transfer) and the release (or transfer) rate of your survived patients. Of course you can see the survival rate of your patients and the percentage of each disposition. There is also a map that plots where your patients are released (or transferred) at.
Dates (When)
We’ve also greatly expanded your ability to modify the date range to render the analytics within. Not only can you change the date range but you can also compare to previous date ranges and group your data by different time frequencies; ie Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year. (Grouping dates by bigger time frequencies is perfect when looking at data over large time periods)
Segment the Data
By default the graphs show data for all your patients, but what if you want to see analytics for a unique segment of your patients? For example, what if you only want to see data for your birds, or raptors, or perhaps all patients from a particular city, or even only patients that were poisoned? No problem!
Just click on the box labeled All Patients and choose which segment of your patients you wan to see.
Want to compare multiple segments of patients? Again no problem. You can choose up to three segments to create your graphs with.
Future Plans
In all honesty it is difficult to describe all the features and functionality of the new Analytics section, simply because of how much you can do with it. Even with this amazing release we are already planning improvements. Soon, we hope to allow you to save favorite graphs into one convenient place. We also want to create the ability to have even more specific segmentation; for example, render the charts for only “songbirds that also had an interaction with a cat”
We are very interested in any charts that you may generate at your own hospital. If there are any useful charts that you think we are missing PLEASE TELL US and share your charts with us ([email protected])! Additionally if you are not able to “discover answers to your own questions” PLEASE TELL US. There may be some tweaking that we need to do.
A Word of Caution
Looking at your analytics can be extremely fun and interesting, however I would like to express a word of caution. It is very easy to read to far into what the analytics are showing you. In other words, don’t let the analytics let you jump to conclusions. Let the analytics confirm, deny or improve your questions. If you see anomalies in the analytics that might indicate something important, or maybe just the result of bad data that needs correcting.
When we first conceptualized WRMD we set some very basic rules and milestones that we wanted to stick to. The first was that WRMD must be as simple as possible so that any wildlife rehabilitator could use it no matter their background or resources. Every time we make a change or add a new feature we still ask our selves “will this benefit our community of users or slow them down? ie: is this the WRMD way.”
Very soon we will be introducing a new feature in WRMD that officially takes WRMD into our second goal; benefitting from all the incredible data you collect on your patients!
Our Second Goal: Benefitting From The Data
In WRMD, you can collect information about who your patients are, where your patients come from, what condition they were in when admitted and what their final outcome was. However, although there are ways to record why a patient was found and admitted, it has always been a little bit difficult to do that. Definitely not in the “WRMD way.” In a forthcoming update, that will change. We are introducing a new field called Circumstances Of Admission that will allow you to tag your patients using predefined terms for any and all reasons the animal was brought in.
The new Circumstances Of Admission field can be found underneath the Reasons for Admission field with all the other Intake related data. Additionally, with each term you choose you can indicate if the circumstance is suspected or confirmed.
But That’s Not All!
You may be excited by this new field but also concerned that you now need to record in multiple places why your patients are admitted. Additionally you may be concerned that you need to go back and update all your past patients. If that’s how you feel then we agree with you.
In keeping with the “will this benefit our community of users or slow them down?” spirit, we wanted to make this new field as powerful as possible but also as simple as possible. With that being said, over the past year we have been developing and training a machine learning application to interpret what is written on your patient records in order to automatically tag your Circumstances Of Admission for you, so you don’t have to.
You and your users can still describe the reason for admission in regular human language. After you have admitted your patient, the Circumstances Of Admission classifier application will use the patients Common Name, Reasons For Admission, Notes About Rescue and Care By Rescuer fields to predict which Circumstances Of Admission tags best fit. You may still manually add or remove terms if needed.
Because of the automatic tagging, the Circumstances Of Admission field will be hidden by default. This way everything will appear the same and you won’t need train your volunteers or staff on the changes.
If you want to manually use the Circumstances Of Admission field, there is a setting under General WRMD Settings to show the Circumstance of Admission field.
Retroactive Tagging
As part of training and validating the Circumstances Of Admission classifier application, we have already tagged the majority of all patients admitted in WRMD over the past year and plan to retroactively tag past patients so that you don’t have to. The Circumstances Of Admission classifier application is not only a huge timesaver for you in realtime, it also has the amazing benefit of going back in time and automatically tagging your older patients. Additionally any imported patients can be automatically tagged in a matter of seconds.
It Gets Better!
With the introduction of the Circumstances Of Admission field we are also releasing a major update to the entire Analytics section of WRMD. One blog post is not enough to describe how powerful the new Analytics section is, but to give you an idea of our motivation, we want to answer the question: “Can the analytics be flexible enough to allow the user to discover answers to their own questions?”
We really hope you use and appreciate the Circumstances Of Admission field. This was an important missing part of WRMD and one that we have been working long and hard on to make simple and amazing.
A complete list of all the Circumstances Of Admissionterms and their definitions will be made available.
The Circumstances Of Admission classifier application is still learning and it may occasionally make incorrect predictions. Please do your part and correct any mistakes for us and help teach the classifier.
We know that the data that you collect is amazing and powerful but we are not in the business of taking, selling or using that data without your permission and understanding.
