WRMD
Wildlife Rehabilitation MD
Make a Donation

Category: Updates

2018 Recap and Plans for 2019

Posted on

I’ll admit it. We’ve been terrible at keeping you informed about how WRMD is doing and what updates we are making. Sorry!

2018 was another busy year for us with lots of new wildlife rehabilitation organizations signing up, some major new features added. We also traveled to meet with our users as often as we could afford it.

In 2018 WRMD admitted an incredible 231,903 patients! That is a major increase over past years. These patients were admitted in by over 500 accounts across 15 countries. Speaking of countries, we are proud to welcome organizations from South Korea, Ireland and Trinidad and Tobago!

We had some amazing milestones in 2018 that we are very proud of:

Wildlife Rehabilitation Medical Database was written into California legislation in Assembly Bill 1031. The Native California Wildlife Rehabilitation Voluntary Tax Contribution Fund allows California tax payers to make voluntary contributions into a competitive grant program whereby California wildlife rehabilitation organizations can apply for a grant, for the purposes of the recovery and rehabilitation of injured, sick, or orphaned wildlife, and conservation education. To be eligible to grant funding “The applicant shall maintain active participation in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Medical Database.”

On October 26 2018 the 1,000,000th patient was admitted into WRMD! A Great Horned Owl from Raymond California admitted to Fresno Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation Services.

We (The Wild Neighbors Database Project) have been accepted as an Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN) member organization. The OWCN is a statewide collective of trained wildlife care providers, regulatory agencies, academic institutions and wildlife organizations working to rescue and rehabilitate oiled wildlife in California. Over the past few years we have been developing a specialized version of WRMD to work specifically for oiled wildlife events. That project is nearing completion and we are now proud to be part of the OWCN response team if (hopefully never) an oil spill occurs in California.

Plans for 2019

In 2019 there will surely be many tweaks and updates but we do have 3 major changes to announce.

Entirely New Way to Generate Reports

Very very soon, WRMD, will have a new way to view and generate reports. In this new way, you will be able to favorite reports for quicker access and preview reports before printing, emailing or exporting them. Each reports will also have unique filters to allow you to modify them as needed. For example, in some reports you will be able to set the reporting dates or exclude certain species taxonomies. This new feature will be available in about 1 week. Expect a blog post detailing how this works.

Prescription Formulary

A commonly requested features is to allow users to maintain their own prescription formulary for common drug/medication prescriptions. This is number 2 on the to-do list. In the formulary you will be able to define a drug, dosage, concentration, route, frequency, duration and many other things. When your formulary is created, you can then choose a formula when writing a prescription to autopopulate the prescription fields. You will also be able to set the dose to be automatically calculated based on the patients last weight.

Species Notifications

Another common request is to have automatically triggered notifications if (for example) a certain species is admitted. We think this is a cool idea. These notifications could be sent by email and/or text message. We need to gather more information about how this might work and how you might use it so please tell us your thoughts.

Contributors

Lastly but not least, we would like to thank everybody that has made donations to our 501(c)(3). Your generosity is what keeps WRMD going, creating new features and answering your questions. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Notes About Rescue and Freeze Patient

Posted on

Hello There, It’s Been a While 🙂

We try not to make any changes during the summer because we know how busy you are but we had to make a few to resolve some issues.

Notes About Rescue

There is a new field called Notes About Rescue. You can use this field to document any supplementary information about the animals rescue such as ‘had a sibling dead/escaped‘, ‘location found is not suitable for release‘ or ‘rescuer would like to be at the release‘. Adding these notes will compliment the Reason for Admission, Care by Rescuer and Transported By fields for a complete picture of the animals life before arriving in your care.

We have noticed that this type of information may be written into the Notes About Rescuer field which should be reserved for information specifically about the rescuer. Such as “Nice person, has offed to have animals released at their property” or “Can be disagreeable, only staff should communicate with him“.

Freeze Patient

We have added the ability to freeze a patient so that it can no longer be updated. This could be very helpful for patients with pending lawsuits or if your governing agency requires no modifications be made after the patient is dispositioned. To freeze a patient go to its record and click More then Patient Settings (More was previously called Share). By default Patient Settings is only available to users with the role Super Admin or Admin.

In Patient Settings, click the Freeze this Patient to Prevent Any Further Updates button. The patient will now be frozen and a “This patient has been frozen and can not be updated.” message will be display above the patients record.

Teaser 😉

Currently Freeze Patient is the only patient setting available, however we have some neat ideas for features to add this fall. Stay tuned! If you have ideas of patient related settings, share those with us. Maybe we can plan it out. [email protected]

New Extensions and Updates

Posted on

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!

More Fixes and Updates

Posted on

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.

What Browser are you Using?

Posted on

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

Posted on

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!

[wpedon id=1695]

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!!!

WRMD Unavailable on Dec 25 and 4pm PST

Posted on

This is just a reminder that on December 25th at 4pm PST (12:00am UTC) WRMD will be unavailable while receiving an upgrade. We are planing for a two hour downtime but also hoping to make WRMD available again as soon as possible so hopefully the disruption won’t be that bad.

A blog post will follow with the details of the upgrade but to give you a summary of the changes right now; very little will appear to have changed, a few things are being added, we are moving onto new servers and things will get a whole lot faster.

In order to receive these upgrades you don’t have to do anything. 🙂
(Although we do greatly appreciate donations!)

Happy Holidays!

The 2017 New Update is Coming!!!

Posted on

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!!!

Batch Update Now Available

Posted on
Drum Roll Please…..

We know many of you have been waiting very patiently the last year for batch updating to be complete. Believe me when I say we got it done as fast as we could. There were many other factors at play that had to be completed before we could get batch updating developed and tested.

Batch Updating

Batch updating will give you the ability to batch “change” multiple fields at once. At this point not all fields are available, but most of the important ones like Locations and Dispositions are. To batch update your records there are four steps to follow. Each of these steps is important so please pay attention to what you are doing. Batch updating is a powerful tool and if used incorrectly it can really mess your records up, so use wisely my friends.

If there are fields that you want to batch update that are currently unavailable, please tell us. We will make fields available as requested once we can ensure that everything is working smoothly.

A Few Things to Know Before Batch Updating

  1. You can not batch update blank values. In other words, you can not batch delete values. Can you image how tragic that could be if used maliciously?
  2. Treatment Logs, Rechecks and Locations can be batch updated however they will not edit past entries. They will instead batch create a new Treatment Logs, Rechecks or Locations for each patient.

Step One

You need to identify the patients which you want to batch update. There are several different ways to do this:

  1. Do a search for terms or fields that all patients might have in common. Example: Search for Common Name=House Finches, Disposition=Pending and current location Enclosure=Aviary 5. This will give you a list of all pending House finches in Aviary 5. Then you might record that they were all released.
  2. Another technique would be to visit the List Patients page and check the checkboxes next to the patients you want to batch update. Example: 5 mallard ducklings that came in that day and you what to transfer them all to another facility. (This will only change their disposition, it will not send the receiving organization the records, you still have to do that manually.)
  3. A hybrid of the 2 above techniques would work as well. Do a search and then check the checkboxes of the patients from the search results to refine who you actually want to batch update. Example: Search for all Common Name=Grey Fox, then click on the checkbox for the ones that are being sent to homecare.

Once you have identified the patients you want to update, click the “Batch Update” button above the list of patients

Identify the Patients to Update
Identify the Patients to Update

Step Two

Fill in the information you wish to Batch Update. There are a few tabs available so switch between them as needed. When you switch tabs the information you have already filled in will stay there.

Fill in the information you wish to Batch Update
Fill in the information you wish to Batch Update

Step Three

You have filled in all the fields that you want to update and now you have a choice on how text fields should be updated. This is IMPORTANT! You will have to choose 1 of these 2 options

  1. Delete existing text values and write my new values in their place
    The first option is to replace the old data that was in the field with your newly entered data. The previous data will be DELETED and REPLACED with the new data you have entered.
  2. Keep existing text values and add my new values by comma separation
    The second option is to KEEP the old data and ADD the new data to whatever was there. Lets say you add a keyword to a group of house finches that are Trichomonas negative. That will allow whatever may already be written in Keywords to stay there and the new term will just be added on and separated by a comma.
How Should Text Values be Updated?
How Should Text Values be Updated?

Step Four

Click Batch Update My Records.

Click Batch Update My Records
Click Batch Update My Records

That’s It.

You should see the batch update results immediately if you go to the patients. If for any reason you feel that the wrong data was updated or there was any error please tell us. We have spent months working out all sorts of bugs and gotchas with this. This is an amazing tool but it can also be very dangerous. It gives you the ability to destroy multiple records at once so please batch wisely.

Scheduled Maintenance

Posted on

Start: 2017-03-08 06:00 UTC
End: 2017-03-08 14:00 UTC

During the above window, there will be an upgrade of our networking software.

During the maintenance window WRMD will lose networking connectivity for a period of up to five minutes. We expect the actual disruption to be minimal for most, but we will be closely monitoring for issues throughout the window.

Do not hesitate to contact support ([email protected]) if you have any additional questions or concerns.