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.
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.
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.
