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Wildlife Rehabilitation MD
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Author: ravilla

Because You’re so Amazing – A Gift to All Our Users!

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Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Amazing!

It has been a year of unlearning. We have had to unlearn all of our normal patterns and come up with new ones to match the times we live in. In many ways unlearning is a very important skill and I think our community has it in abundance. While the pandemic had little to no effect for some, for others it had a devastating blow. Despite this global event the wildlife rehabilitation community showed it’s incredible resilience in the face of all of it. What a community of people we have! Organizations had to cut staff, intake more patients and limit or completely eliminate their essential volunteer programs; and yet they still kept going. You are all amazing and we are so honored to support your efforts in the best way we can.

First off, we need to send a huge grateful, heartfelt, giant blown kiss and thank you to everybody that donated during our end-of-year fundraiser. We recognized the fact that it was not exactly the best time to do it, but our resources were getting lower then we like to keep them. To date, we were able to raise around $12,000!!! Bless you all, so much!!! This money will help us upgrade many of the tools we use to keep WRMD working smoothly and efficiently. WRMD just keeps on growing and so we have to continue to grow our database as well. For those that became sustaining donors with yearly, quarterly or monthly contributions – we are eternally grateful for your support. With this support from all of our donors we are able to continue to Keep WRMD Free to All. We consider this project a group effort and without the support of those that can contribute we all help those that can’t.

If you would like to become a recurring donor please visit https://www.wrmd.org/donate. Our goal is to have a sustainable recurring donor base of $1,000 per month.

A Gift From Our Friends at Birds of the World – Cornell Lab of Ornithology

We are always looking for better opportunities and partnerships for WRMD, as are some of our most avid supporters. Well one of these amazing supporters has worked out a deal with The Cornell Lab of Ornithology – Birds of the World to provide all WRMD users free access to their database. If you haven’t used this before, prepare to be amazed! Almost anything that you could possible want to know about any bird in the world is all in one place. When do they migrate, where do they migrate too, when do they molt, what do they sound like? You name it, it is all there. We plan to push up this new update this weekend March 27, 2021. After that there will be a small change to the Dashboard page, where this amazing resource will be located. We are very excited about this resource and it is our hope for you to get loads of information out of it and enjoyment it! Stay tuned for an update to the WRMD dashboard for a link to Birds of the World.

Slowing Down on New Feature Request

We also are in the process of slowing down on new feature requests. We have so many on our plate that we need to get done, we just can’t really accept new ideas at this time. This year we hope to role out a new Daily Tasks feature we have been working on for some time now, that will encompass all of the rechecks prescriptions and daily husbandry needs of the patients. This will help you organize all of your daily tasks in a much more efficient manner. We also have a long list of little upgrades and features that need to be adjusted and finished. So, for now feel free to send us new ideas, but there is a good chance we will not be able to get to them this year.

The Future of Wildlife Rehabilitation Data

When Devin and I (Rachel) started this project we did not know where it would take us, but we had a vision of where it could go. Our #1 priority has always been our users and the integrity of their data. This year we will surpass 2 million patients from dozens of countries dating back to 1979. No where in the world is there a data set like this one, so what do we do with this knowledge, how can we benefit wildlife rehabilitators and wildlife as a whole, and what does this look like while maintaining the security and integrity of all of our users? We are starting to have to face this question as our users, researchers and journalist learn about us and are looking for information about wildlife. We have always used WRMD as a source of aggregate data… While not everybody uses WRMD, the bulk of patients that come into rehab probably use WRMD, so it is the largest most diverse dataset in the world for wildlife patients.

Within California, where we live, we have been working with UC Davis, California Fish and Wildlife and around 40 participating wildlife organizations to help us create a way to make aggregate data usable for not only researchers or agencies, but also wildlife rehabilitators. While we will never, ever release personal identifiable information unless prior approval from the directors of an organization, the collective aggregate knowledge has potentially powerful implications. What if we were able to identify potential disease outbreaks in wildlife before it becomes an outbreak and your organization is automatically notified to watch out for these patients early on? Maybe better legislation can be passed because we have evidence of the damage rodenticide and lead have on wildlife populations. Or maybe the value of wildlife rehabilitation as a professional field is recognized and programs are created to help fund our work. There is a growing realization in the world’s agencies of the need for better monitoring of all animals – silver lining to Covid-19… Wildlife Rehabilitators happen to be first responders to any wildlife health event and they have the most realtime in-the-field information; therefore rehabilitators are valuable and essential members in the larger conversation of the One Health discussion.

Our hope is that we can use this aggregate data to help wildlife rehabilitators, support wildlife and promote the importance of our field. We want to do this while maintaining the trust of our users and integrity of the data. We know that not all of our users understand this crazy, online, database, techy world and we promise that we will never do anything with the data without your knowledge. The last thing we want is to break your trust in us. We are working though this learning process very slowly and deliberately to make sure it is done right. So, stay tuned for any further developments if you are interested.

– Rachel Avilla

Early 2020 Updates and Important Information

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Now That Most Of the Reporting Is Done..

December and January are two of the busiest months for WRMD. Reporting takes its toll on everybody. We  work really hard to make sure that everybody’s reports are functioning correctly and that giant reports are not crashing our servers, which has happened a few times. Every year or two we have to upgrade our servers to handle all of the activity that happens this time of year, and we  will be upgrading again soon. Thank you for your patience. 

NWRA Symposium

WRMD will be attending the NWRA Symposium this year in South Padre Island, Texas – Feb 25-29. If you are also attending we would love to meet you! Bring any and all questions, concerns, comments and feedback to us, or just come by and say hi.  We will also be presenting on Thursday morning from 8:30-9:30AM and hope to see you there!

We are especially looking for feedback for our proposed new Husbandry extension. If you have been waiting patiently for this extension please come and chat with us. We are looking for suggestions and advice on recording husbandry information.

Analytics

Devin, our developer, has been working extra hard to improve the Analytics section of WRMD. We want our users to be able to view their data in whatever way they need. All I can say is that what he is creating is absolutely beautiful! Seriously, the graphs are like artwork and the information they provide is invaluable. Devin  is doing everything he can to get it done so he can unveil it during our presentation at the NWRA symposium (fingers crossed). Things to look forward to!

M-Opinion & the Migratory Bird Treaty Act

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is under attack and birds need you to speak for them. The language within this 100+ year old treaty has been scrutinized and recently a new proposed regulation change is underway. The M-Opinion  proposes to redefine the meaning of the “incidental take”. The change effectively allows anybody who “accidentally” destroys, kills, or harms any MBTA protected bird, nest or egg to do so with no penalty. An example of this would be an oil spill where birds are not intentionally harmed. Currently, oil spillers have to pay a price for this. The M-Opinion would make it so they could get off scot-free. The same would be true of a tree-trimming company did not intend to wipe out an entire colony of herons and their nests. They may now experience no repercussions. On a smaller level, we may no longer be able to tell the public that removing a nest that has baby birds in it is illegal. We all know how devastating this could be to all MBTA protected birds. USFW has finally opened this up for public comment and we need to comment this until they have no more space on their server to hold all the comments. Spread this far and wide. We only have until March 19, 2020. Let’s do everything we can to stop this change. https://www.regulations.gov/document

A Great Question From a User

This is from a new user and it inspired me to write this blog:

“I have just one more question as well. I am using the program for our intakes only. We are a larger facility and still growing and the rehabilitation staff have a paperwork system that works really well for them as far as exams, feedings, vet visits etc. Does utilizing your system just for what we need hurt us in anyway? I was not sure if I just used it for intakes and out comes and used our paper system for the rehab side of things if that would be an issue in anyway.”

Here is our response: 

We designed WRMD so that it could be used any way you want and need. Most wildlife rehabilitation organizations that have existed for 10 years or more started with paper records, which is completely fine. However, one of the big reasons we developed WRMD was to create a tool that can save institutional knowledge in a useful, easy-to-search format. When we ask, “What medication did we give that patient 5 years ago that worked, because we now have a similar situation?”, we can easily and quickly find the answer in WRMD. With paper you really can’t do that. So much information is lost on paperwork. On the flip side I do think that it can work great for many tasks such as husbandry charts or prescription forms that can be written on and checked off. WRMD provides many paper forms within our “Paper Form” extension that, when used, translate nicely into the digital format of WRMD. 

We have found that the normal progression of our WRMD users is to start small. Many rehabilitators just add in their intakes and dispositions to get the reports and basic stats they need. Once they get used to using WRMD and can navigate more easily, they slowly start to incorporate its’ other features. Features like the Prescriptions extension can automatically calculate the dose your patient from the last recorded weight once you add information into your Prescription Formulary. In order to do that you need to use Locations and record in weights. If you use the Rechecks feature, a daily calendar is automatically generated for you on a daily basis, but you have to add in these rechecks.  All these little features help save you time that could be used on animal care instead of paperwork and calendars.. How you use WRMD is up to you. We support you, whatever way you decide to use WRMD. Our first priority is to make things easy for our users, and everything else comes later.

– Rachel Avilla

New Extensions and Updates

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During the NWRA 2018 Symposium, we are pleased to announce some fantastic new features. You may have already seen some of them but there are few that are just RIGHT NOW being released.

Three New Extensions

Daily Exams

With this extension you may now record as many “daily” exams as you want. The form is just like the Intake Exam form on Initial Care.

Expenses

This amazing extension helps you record daily expenses for each of your patients and helps you calculate the Cost-of-Care. Each expense transaction can be categorized so you may report on (for example) how much was spent on prescriptions. You can also print out an Expense Statement for an individual patient as well as an Expense by Category report for all of your patients.

Hotline

If you are a wildlife rehabilitator, you probably receive all sorts of calls from the public. We are very proud to announce our new Hotline extension. You can now log your communications with the public as well as track the progress of an incident’s continued communications. Not only will be able to search the callers to see if they are repeat offenders but also be able to identify calls that may be about the same incident.


We want to thank Belize Bird Rescue for sponsoring the development of the Expenses and Hotline extensions. Because of their support we were able to develop these way ahead of schedule. If you ever want to visit Belize please check out the Rock Farm Guest House at Belize Bird Rescue for a fabulous Belizean experience.


Admitting a Patient Into Any Year

When admitting a new patient, you may now specify the year that patient should be added to. Of course if you change the year dropdown list the “Next Case Number” will change to reflect the year you selected.

More Recheck List Filters

On the recheck list you can now filter it to only view pending patients. Also, if you are using prescriptions extensions, prescriptions can be filtered into each patient and will only show up if the prescription is actually due on the day request.


Searching Lab Values

Previously searching lab values was difficult to do and returned inconsistent results. We’ve mad that process much more simple (and it works)!

Two New Lists On the List Patients Screen

On the List Patients screen you can click the List All Patients heading to select a different list to look at. We recently added Forgotten Patients and Patients Without a Location.

  • Forgotten Patients – shows all patients that have not been updated in the past 7 days or does not have a pending recheck.
  • Patients Without a Location – Hopefully self explanatory. Shows all patients that do not have a location on their record.


Lots of Smaller Updates and Bug Fixes

  1. Begun adding new analytics and ways of filtering the analytics.
  2. Added a taxonomy tree map in analytics.
  3. In the people section there is a tab for members.

Of course if you discover any bugs or have an idea that you think other WRMD users would benefit from then please reach out to us. We love to hear from you all and want to make WRMD as best as possible!

Hope to See you at the NWRA Symposium!

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WRMD will again have a booth at the NWRA symposium. This year it is in Anaheim/Orange, CA, in our home state!!! Please come and visit us, we love to meet our users and put a name to the face. We may even ask to take a photo with your name tag so we can remember the face that belongs to the name.

We will also have a presentation on Friday, March 2 at 8AM. We will talk about some of the projects we have been working on and we are going to reveal some exciting new features and extension that have just been developed!

Come and find us! We look forward to seeing everybody!

More Fixes and Updates

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The WRMD team has been working as diligently as we can to make sure WRMD is fully functional. We wanted to touch on several fixes that we recently implemented and discuss some issues that have come up.

Recent Fixes

  1. The List Patient’s screen is loading much faster.
  2. We have added the “Save your Changes” Prompt back. This means you can not leave a page unless you save your data. There seemed to be several occasions where data was missing. When we researched it in the background it appeared to have never been saved to begin with. We, hope this prompt will fix the “missing data” issue.
  3. The feature that would not allow you to access a record because someone else was accessing it has been fixed.
  4. The Prescription Units will default to the most common used.
  5. Calculators are fixed.
  6. Date Picker… We are continuing to see if we can create a manual way to add a date as well as pick a date. This has been very complicated and thank you for you patience.
  7. The Search Rescuer Tab under the Add New Patient screen has been fixed, there was an issue with the new Permissions.
  8. There is no longer a Shortcut Extension, however we have added a permanent “Map to Address Found” to Quick Links.

Other notes

  1. Federal Report: The Nature of Injury section is filled in by the Diagnosis field, which is what we were told by the Feds to do. However Section C. “Reported Injuries/Mortalities” wants the “Cause/Nature of Injury”. This will autofill the Circumstances of Admission and the Diagnosis.
  2. Species Reconciliation: when a patient is added to the database and the Common Name is not chosen from the drop down list, the database will try to guess what you meant. If it can not figure it out it will remain an unidentified species. During this update the database attempted to reconcile many of these patients that were not identified, so you may have had a slight change in your report numbers since this update reconciled many species. If you find something funky please let us know and we will fix it.

Still to work on

  1. Shortcuts Extension: this extension included the Map to where the patient was found and the quick link to print record.
  2. Search Lab Values
  3. The ability to combine Rechecks and Medications in one report.

Update Fixes

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Thank you everybody for being forth coming with the issues that are popping up. I want to let everybody know what we have fixed so far.

  1. Attachments are now uploading and printing.
  2. “Forgot my Password” is now working.
  3. Exports now have data in them.
  4. The “Treatment Log” should be saved by clicking “Create New Treatment Log” and can also be saved by clicking “Update Patient” at the bottom of the screen.
  5. Pagination in List View allows you to skip to the end.
  6. Prescriptions are not making everything a Controlled Substance on the List of Prescriptions.
  7. You can now have the “Search Rescuers Tab” default on the “Create New Patient” page.
  8. With the new Date Picker there are some differences. You may notice that when recording the “Date Admitted” different then “Now” you have to click out of the box to move on. This is because there is a good chance that if you are creating a new patient at a later time, the time admitted will not be the same time as “Now”, so the box can’t automatically retract. If you press enter on this screen, that signifies you want to submit the whole page. We will research if there is any way we can improve.
  9. “Autocomplete” has had an attitude adjustment and is working better.

Other new features we didn’t tell you about

  1. For Autocomplete there is a new feature. In “Settings” under “Autocomplete” the default is set to allow for multiple Autocompletes or you can change it to just allow for one. For Example in “Reason for Admission” you can select Hit Window, Cat Caught – or – for “City Found” you can have it so that you can only select one.
  2. We have created a new feature called Authorizations. Within “Settings” if you have access, you will see an “Authorizations” link. We have defaulted these features to certain “Roles”. You can now change the Authorizations of the entire Role or you can change an Individuals “Authorizations” by going to “Users and Staff” and clicking on the “Edit” icon associated with that persons name.

We are still working on some of the more complicated issue that have come up. Thank you again and Happy New Year!!!

What Browser are you Using?

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Thank you for everybody’s patience with the new update. It appears that a few users are still struggling to access their records.

We have run many tests and experiments and for the most part everything is working. If you are one of those that is still having major issues, it is probably because you have an old or obsolete Browser.

If you are using Internet Explorer you need to update to either Google Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft no longer supports Internet Explorer and has not updated it to allow for new software and never will.

If you are using rather old versions of any other browsers, now is the time to update it. Some of our new features can only run on the updated browser systems.

If you update your browser and still have issue please send us a message or email me at [email protected].

Thank you!

Updates for 2018

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First off, it is important to understand that very little in the foreground of WRMD has actually changed. Most of the updates are in the background and nothing has been removed.

Every few years WRMD requires an update. Technology changes so quickly and new features become available to us. However, at some point we can’t add new features until we implement an update. Once updated we are able to create new features.

For this update the entire background code has been cleaned up. This will mean that overall, WRMD will be more efficient and easier for us to maintain. This allows us to make changes and create new features more easily.

We have put a lot of effort into improving the user experience. WRMD will be quicker due to the fact that we have added more servers, that are themselves, far more up to date. Many minor quarks and bugs have also been dealt with.

Before we list the new updates we want to thank all of the generous individuals and organizations that have made recent donations to WRMD.  We are committed to keeping WRMD free to use however, it isn’t free to us. Each of these updates takes a lot of time and resources on our part, so we greatly appreciate any financial contributions you are capable of making. Thank you all for sticking with us on this amazing journey!

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What this Update Includes

  1. There is a new extension called “Daily Exams”. This extension is modeled off of the “Initial Exam” page, but it can be used to record exams throughout the patient’s recovery. It will save each exam separately and there is no limit to the number of exams you can record. Like all other extensions, whatever is recorded here will be filtered into the “Treatment Log”.
  2. A New “Transported by Field” will be in the “Intake” box, which is found in the “Create New Patient” screen. This allows contact information to be recorded about the transporter, if it is different then the Rescuer.
  3. On the “Create New Patient” screen, an option has been added at the bottom of the page that can prompt an immediate batch update. For example if you get in 10 ducklings, you can choose to batch update their Age and any other information that may be the same.
  4. All of the date fields have a new Date Picker. We took a long time deciding on this new Date Picker, we hope it works well for you. The best thing about this Date Picker is that you can choose an icon with a circle and checkmark that will record “NOW”. However if there is already a date in that field “NOW” will not work. 
  5. The pagination on the List Records screen is quicker and it doesn’t have to reload each time.
  6. Banding and Morphometrics can be exported in a format that can be imported into Bandit 4.0. Auxiliary band information has been added as well.
  7. In combine people, it will show you a list of all the matches, not just the first 10.
  8. We added in the “Initial Exam” an option for Mucous Membrane Texture as well as Mucous Membrane Color.
  9. The Header info has been re-designed and simplified: Settings, Change Accounts, Sign Out, Support/ Tutorials and Donate to WRMD is now under the Name of the user, on the top right of the screen as seen below.
  10. There are many other small changes that would take too long to list here, so we’ll just sum them up by saying they are all meant to make WRMD simpler and faster for you.

Once this update is completed and successful, we have a few new features we plan to create. Some examples: being able to Batch update and Search Lab Values, Batch update prescriptions, Pre-set some prescription values and the ability to filter prescriptions into the Recheck report. There are many more we have lined up.

Thank you for your patience and support. We know many of these features are long-awaited and we do try to work through these request as fast as we can. If at any point you notice a bug, or something not working quite right please let us know ASAP. While we run 1000’s of tests, we are far from perfect.

Happy New Year!!!

The 2017 New Update is Coming!!!

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This has been a very busy year for WRMD! During the last 12 months we have attended 7 events where WRMD was represented. We got to travel to 5 states and had the pleasure of visiting over a dozen organizations, most using WRMD and some not using WRMD. Never in our wildest dreams did we think our little database project would travel around the globe and be used by nearly 400 organizations in 46 US states and 11 countries!!!

Who do you Love?:

We appreciate all of the support and gratitude we receive from our dedicated wildlife rehabilitation community. It makes us so happy to know that WRMD has made a positive impact on your organizations. If anybody would like to add to our testimonials page we would happily post it during the new year. Just email me at [email protected] (Yes, I finally have an easy email address). If you email me a testimonial by Feb 1, 2018, you will be entered in a raffle to win a free Med, Large or X-Large WRMD teeshirt, or a Sergio Lub Wild Neighbors bracelet.

Annual Report Reminder:

This is the time of year most organizations are beginning to think about state and or federal reports. Please let us know if there is something not right with your report so we can fix it ASAP, and hopefully not at the last minute.

IMPORTANT: If your species are not coming up correctly on your reports, it is likely because you have species whose common names have been entered incorrectly, which categorizes them as “unidentified”. If you do a full search and export your patients class, order and family, you will be able to see all patients in your database that are unidentified.

2017 Update Release on Dec 25 (SERVER WILL BE DOWN):

We have been working all year on a very big update. This update has most of the additional suggestions and features that we have accumulated over the year. With this update we are also updating our servers, which should help in WRMD’s  overall speed and performance. After this update is released PLEASE feel free to contact us if something is not working as it should. With all updates not everything will be 100% perfect, but we have made sure that all reporting is as perfect as we can get it.

****IMPORTANT:  On December 25th WRMD will be down all day! Please plan to have no access to WRMD this day. Hopefully, you can take a much needed day off from data entry. On Dec 26th there will be a new and improved WRMD to use. ****

In the next Blog post we will outline all of the updates and new features we’ve  added to WRMD.

Thank you and have a good holiday season!!!

Resiliency in the Face of Disaster

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Hi all,

This year Devin and I (Rachel) went to the Florida Wildlife Rehabilitation Conference just 10 days after hurricane Irma wrecked havoc on Florida. It was beautiful to see that even after such devastation the group still came together, supported each other and had their conference. It was a beautiful thing to see. Now in my home town, I am seeing the same thing happen.

As you may know by now, Northern California is experiencing a devastating series of fires. The Tubbs Fire, Atlas Fire, Sulfur Fire, Redwood Complex Fire, Pocket Fire, Nuns Fire…. The list goes on. It is my home turf and several of my family and friends have been affected and lost homes. Devin and I are however, safe for now. We may be surround on all sides, but our little valley seems to be okay this year. We just wanted everybody to know we are safe, vigilant and okay.

In the midst of this terrible tragedy our surrounding Wildlife Rehabilitation organizations have been helping each other out, sharing, switching and transporting patients. We are part of such a compassionate, caring, and wonderful community.

After hurricane Harvey, Irma and Maria it almost gives you hope, despite all of our differences, we can join together and help each other out. Especially our awesome worldwide Wildlife Rehabilitation Community.