A typical day of a swine production veterinarian is filled with many important tasks including maintaining a regular schedule, performing site visits, writing production site reports, evaluating treatment records, maintaining vaccination programs, training employees, and interpreting diagnostic information. Whenever a problem suddenly arises, the veterinarian has to coordinate a quick response plan to ensure that employees have all the help they need while still performing all their regular activities.
When COVID-19 spread into the United States, telemedicine became a common way for doctors and veterinarians to communicate with patients without violating rules regarding social distancing and quarantining. While the world is trying to revert to normalcy prior to the pandemic, some procedures developed during COVID may be permanently implemented. This article will look at how telemedicine can help improve a swine veterinarian’s response time which will help serve more farms than the traditional way of swine medicine.
Helping Swine Veterinarians Overcome Everyday Challenges
The most common problem that swine veterinarians have is time management. “How can I, as a veterinarian, maintain a regular schedule of production sites, fill out paperwork, develop a treatment plan, and still handle health problems that suddenly arise?” Some veterinarians choose to take calls during their free time or while they are on the road. This allows them to start a treatment plan before arriving at the farm; however, it does not allow them to have much downtime. Although this solution can work, there’s a better answer to this problem and that is utilizing EveryPig in conjunction with the phone calls. EveryPig’s Daily Checkup feature helps the production manager and working crew focus on problems like mortalities, treatments, symptoms, or animal movement, then reports any problems to the veterinarian. The veterinarian can access the reports from his smartphone, thus eliminating the need for a phone call. He/she then can evaluate the issue and decide if something needs to be done.
EveryPig helps streamline communication between veterinarians and production sites. The second most common problem that swine veterinarians have is serving and helping to manage production sites in an efficient manner. The best solution for this problem is to create a schedule with minimal downtime and drive to as many production sites as possible. This is what typical swine veterinarians commonly do today. But with the EveryPig app, it would be easier and more convenient for swine veterinarians t0 adhere to the farms’ downtime protocols, get to as many places as they can during a week, and utilize EveryPig to monitor the production sites that they do not have time to visit.
EveryPigs’ Farmfeed, keeps swine veterinarians up to date by simply scrolling through the important updates reported in daily checkups from all of their farms. The Farmfeed feature allows the veterinarian to set limits as to what constitutes a “red flag”. EveryPig allows the swine veterinarian to provide service to many production sites simultaneously, thus maximizing the number of farms they can serve.
Like many other aspects of our lives, COVID-19 altered the way we conduct swine production medicine. However, as the world aims to return to normal, when social distancing and quarantining procedures are slowly going away, some things that we did during COVID-19 will remain because they helped streamline normal swine production practices. Telemedicine and EveryPig have paved the way for swine veterinarians to facilitate communication and maximize the ability to visit and monitor as many production sites as possible.
-Dr. C. Grace Elijah for EveryPig
