WRMD
Wildlife Rehabilitation MD
Make a Donation

Tag: analytics

Flexible Analytics

Posted on

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

Analytic Segments

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.

Other than that enjoy the new Analytics!

Circumstances Of Admission Tagging

Posted on

Our First Goal: Keeping WRMD Simple

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?”

In the new Analytics section you can see what your most frequent circumstances of admission are, what their survival rate is and how often they occur over time. To learn all about the new Analytics section read this blog post.

Thanks!

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.

Just Some Foot Notes
  • The Circumstances Of Admission terms are based of the Clinical Wildlife Health Initiative terminology with some modification and additions.
  • A complete list of all the Circumstances Of Admission terms 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.

Enhanced Wildlife Disease Surveillance in California

Posted on

Nearly six years ago, when we first set out to create WRMD, we set a few priority goals. We first wanted to provide wildlife rehabilitators with an amazing, simple, and free database to help them with their daily record keeping needs. We also wanted to create an interface to aggregate data across multiple organizations and to allow for the entire community to benefit from their shared data. We wanted a tool that could help wildlife rehabilitators identify emerging wildlife trends and communicate those trends out to a network of rehabilitators and other wildlife professionals. We are proud to introduce the beta release of WRMD Investigator and its pilot program Enhanced Wildlife Disease Surveillance in California!

Thank you once again to those centers who indicated their willingness to partner with us on the Enhanced Wildlife Disease Surveillance project! This week, we are launching the enhanced wildlife disease surveillance system using the new surveillance platform in WRMD.

This system is the first of its kind, to facilitate real-time monitoring of wildlife diseases and mortality events in California wildlife. Information arising from the enhanced surveillance will be made available to the network of collaborating wildlife rehabilitation centers in order to increase awareness of wildlife health events throughout the state.

The new platform to be used for the project aggregates data from our network of partner centers on a weekly basis and detects and alerts investigators to potential unusual wildlife health events (e.g., disease outbreaks). The data to be aggregated from participating centers includes admission date, reason for admission, location found, diagnosis, age, disposition, and clinical signs on initial exam.

WRMD Surveillance Investigator

Depending on the circumstances of the alert, the Wildlife Health Center and CDFW will be reaching out to partner centers to follow-up with collaborative investigations. Please note that this project doesn’t require extra effort for centers and personally identifiable information and information related to treatment/management of cases is not accessible to investigators or partners.

If your center is interested in participating in the study, it is not too late to join our list of partners. If interested, please email Devin at [email protected].

Threats to wild animals are increasing at an alarming rate. There is a critical need for increased monitoring of impacts of these threats on wildlife species, especially species that are difficult to monitor. In California, centers collectively rehabilitate ~ 500 different species of wild animals annually and are uniquely positioned to contribute significant information about threats to a diverse range of wildlife species in the state!

Thank you for your support and please let us know if your center is interested in participating in the study!
Devin Dombrowski, Wildlife Rehabilitation MD Developer
Wild Neighbors Database Project (WNDP)
Terra Kelly, Wildlife Veterinarian and Epidemiologist
Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center
University of California- Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine
Nicole Carion, Statewide Wildlife Rehabilitation Coordinator
California Department of Fish and Wildlife

March Update: Analytics and NWRA

Posted on

Thank you again for your patience. I know that there are some features that are being highly anticipated and we are doing everything we can to
get them out.

After today, the Analytics section will be up and running again. We have put in a few graphs to start, basically the most asked for ones. So, go check them out.

Analytics

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 2.40.59 PM

  • There are multiple tabs available to Browse as you can see in the Overview snapshot.
    • Within the Overview section you can see the Total Patients per Day by Class
    • Top 10 Species that came in
    • Top 10 Cities patients come from
  • You will also notice near the top of the page the option to select the Date Admitted. Here you can choose your range, but you have to click Apply for it to be able to work. (IMPORTANT: Due to this addition of Apply, when you do searches there is now an Apply button as well.)

 

  • The next tab is the Species Overview Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 2.41.20 PM
    • Patients by Taxonomic Class
    • Patients by Taxonomic Group, we cheated on this one a little and it is really by lay group, we call it…

 

  • The next tab is the Disposition OverviewScreen Shot 2016-03-07 at 2.41.31 PM
    • Disposition Percentages
    • Survival Rates

 

This is just the beginning and if you have an ideas for more brilliant analytics please let us know. Please email me at [email protected].

 

We also, finally added back the graph weights which I apologize personally to all the squirrel parents out there for not getting that up sooner, but it is now operational and can be found at the top of the Treatment Log area.

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 2.39.30 PM

 

NWRA:

I have a table at NWRA and if you are going to be there, please stop by and say Hi! Expect to get a picture taken with your name tag so that I can try to start identifying all the lovely users I spend so much time communicating with. Marie Travers who works with us and the AWESOME group Bird Ally X will be my backup when I am not at the table. We will have our WRMD shirts available when any donation over $30 is made to WRMD.

February WRMD Update

Posted on

We have made it through the first month of the WRMD 3.0 update! What a month it was. Thank you everybody for your patience and we are sorry for any and all inconvenience the transition has caused. I know that reporting time is neigh upon us and we are the cause of some lateness due to trying to make sure everything matches up correctly.

Unidentified Species and Reporting

A few things to keep in mind while reporting is that in several cases the species are unidentified. It is critical that you choose from the drop down list provided. If you can not find the species you are looking for contact us, chances are it has an alternative name which can be found in wikipedia pretty easily. For example some was looking for Groundhog which was not in the database, being Groundhog’s day… I looked it up in wikipedia and saw that they are also known as a Woodchuck which was in the database. So, woodchuck could have been used instead. However, we are able to add the common name Groundhog to the species, so now you can use Woodchuck or Groundhog and both are the same. We will create a way in settings to look up your unidentified species, but as for now you can see that a species is unidentified by exporting everything from a list into excel. If you see a species_id number as 999999 it is an unidentified animal.

See the ExampleScreen Shot 2016-02-02 at 10.52.09 AM

Customization and Reporting

Every state has their own requirement and we work hard to make sure that at the least you are able to record the necessary information required for your reports. Some states like New York have many custom settings to record information that is required by the state. So, sometimes we have to work out some of the bugs that come along with customization before everything works smoothly.

Custom Fields

The same thing goes for Custom Fields.Screen Shot 2016-02-02 at 11.07.52 AM As many have now noticed you can only have 10 custom fields, anything beyond that will not allow for data to be recorded. We have worked with a few organizations to try and dwindle down their custom fields to a manageable level. Still, custom fields are a little more finicky because they have to format themselves in to everything else which is pre-formatted by WRMD and sometimes bugs occur. If you are in need of more custom fields, then please contact us so that we can help either dwindle down what you have or we will be able to do custom extensions for a charge. This will not launch until we are sure we have all the kinks worked out in WRMD 3.0. (Note: Custom fields in image are Sector and Aid Station)

WRMD Adding Back its Lost Features

It was really important to WRMD that we get the Heart of WRMD 3.0 working smoothly. In order to do this we did not move over all of the features that WRMD 2.0 had, such as WRMD Import and Necropsy among many other features. As, WRMD 3.0 is getting debugged and our customer service is slowing down, we can now focus on getting more of the WRMD 2.0 features into WRMD 3.0.

Necropsy

As of today the Necropsy extension will be available again. Thanks to some help from out users, it is beefed up substantially. Keep in mind this is designed for veterinarians, but can be used by any skilled Prosector.

Screen Shot 2016-02-02 at 11.12.55 AM          Screen Shot 2016-02-02 at 11.13.05 AM

Analytics

This month we will work on getting Analytics back on board as well. So, if you have a analytic that you would like to see in the analytics section that would be useful to all wildlife rehabilitators let us know and we will consider adding it in. Email us at [email protected] for suggestions.

Donations

Thanks to all that made donations in 2015!!!! If you have made donations in the year 2015 and need a donation receipt from us, please send me an email to the above email address with your name and address so I can send those out to you ASAP.