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 Admissionterms 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.

Circumstances Of Admission Tagging