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Wildlife Rehabilitation MD
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Tag: End of 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!!!

Winter is Coming…

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Winter is indeed just around the corner. With winter comes the New Year and the bulk of the annual reports are due. It is very important that you start looking at your State and Federal reports right now to find inconsistencies.

Winter To-Do List4-ways-to-rock-your-to-do-list

  • Search all pending records and make sure you close out all patients that are not in your care.
  • If your state has a state report, make sure you can access it and that it is working. It is found under “Quick Links”, “Reports” If you do not see a state report for your state, please send us a blank copy ASAP so we can get it into the system. We believe we have them all, but if we don’t we would appreciate your help.
  • Make sure mammals, birds and herps are where they belong in the report. Sometimes if a species is changed in the Cage Card it does not fully update, we can not find any reason why it does this, but we think it happens by not clicking update. It will change the species name but not the species info behind the scenes.
  • Identify unidentified species. It is very common to have several species that are not identified correctly. If someone just types is swallow instead of selecting Barn Swallow, then the database does not recognize that screen-shot-2016-11-28-at-1-42-37-pmanimal. The database is pretty smart, but not that smart. My hope is that this week we can create an easy way to fix the unidentified animals through settings. Until then, the easiest thing to do is search all 2016 records, Export Records, select the Common Name and all the Taxonomy and export. This will give you a list you can compare common names entered and the animals taxonomy. If it says unidentified in all the taxa, you know it is an unidentified animal. The Case # is the ID and you can go back into WRMD and fix the info.

Suggestions and Ideas

Throughout the year we get many new suggestions, ideas and possible fixes. We always look at these, filter through what can be done and can’t be done and put them on a priority list. I would like to invite our users to make any suggestions and ideas they would like to see in the New Year. We have many items on our lists, but we would like to see what is more urgent for our users. Please email me at [email protected]. I will do my best to reply quickly on if it is something will can do and also the status of that suggestion.

We are particularly interested in ideas for analytic and reports you would like to see more of. Feel free to repeat yourself if you have already sent me ideas in the past.

Time to Start Cleaning up your Records

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Yeah for fall and winter time! Patient load slows down and you almost get a chance to breathe. It is not the wonderful time of year to work on paperwork. I know that this is, by far, everybody’s favorite part of the the job and can’t wait to get started!

The reason I bring this topic up now, is because I know through experience that the sooner you get started the easier it is. It is so much better to do a little here and there because, by the time the new year surprises us and reports are do, all the data is cleaned up.

Here are some of the fields that you might want to start looking at to make corrections.

  1. Cities: believe it or not we sometimes spell our cities wrong. I was just going through one of my accounts and found one city that just had a . (period) in it. Another had both the full typed out city and then just the quick hand version. In the report section, Total Cases by Location Found,  you can download a report and see all the mistakes, search for them and fix them.
  2. Species: This one is a little more difficult, but you want to go through and make sure all the species are filled in and spelt correctly. The easiest correction is Unknown. The term WRMD uses is unidentified, bird or unidentified, bat and so on. Another way to correct species is to search all records and export the Case # and Species into excel. Sort that list you should be able to easily see species that are not right. If it is even different by a capital letter then it is likely wrong.  Remember, if the species was not selected from the menu and instead, typed in, the database does not recognize it. WRMD does do an audit of species and fix many of the mistakes, but not all of them.
  3. Pending cases: Sometimes we miss an animal and it will be a house finch pending from February. You know this is not true, so it might take time to figure out what happened to it so that it can be recorded appropriately.

As I mentioned, it is easiest to do a little here and a little there, then it does not seem so daunting a task. If you need any help, as always just send us a message.