In an exciting development from their human-health work, Cemplicity, a world leader in Patient-Reported Measures software, has just launched its first animal-health outcomes programme, designed to improve care for our canine friends suffering from arthritis.
CVS group, one of the UK’s largest veterinary service providers with over 500 surgeries across the UK, Netherlands and the Republic of Ireland, has a purpose to give animals the best possible care. It was with this purpose in mind that they embarked on the partnership with Cemplicity.
“We’re very interested in quality improvement, and this project is centered on our referral hospitals where we carry out a lot of orthopaedic surgery,” says John Innes, Chief Veterinary Officer at CVS Group.
The project itself mirrors Cemplicity’s PROMs (Patient Reported Outcome Measures) programme being used in human healthcare across the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Running across CVS’s 9 referral centres which each provide first class specialist treatment, the programme gives CVS Group the ability to capture real-time data from their clients (the dog owners) about their dogs (the patients) who are undergoing and recovering from surgery. This new data set is rich in insight and provides the organisation with the ability to better understand the effectiveness of its care and identify opportunities for improvement.
Says Innes: “We’re interested in following up all of our cases in a streamlined way, not just one-off studies, but beyond that so we can understand what happens to our dogs long-term after surgery. This will help us refine our treatments to be the best they can possibly be.”
The programme uses a validated survey tool, Liverpool Osteoarthritis in Dogs (LOAD) questionnaire that was developed by Innes himself when he was a professor at University of Liverpool. The tool is now translated into 14 different languages and is used internationally.
“It’s become one of a handful of standard survey tools in animal health.” says Innes. “It’s going to bring us lots of exciting data and once you start measuring things, then you can start improving things.”
Innes is excited about using Cemplicity in what he believes is a world first for veterinary medicine.
“Having seen how Cemplicity works for patient-reported outcomes across healthcare settings, it just occurred to me that we have nothing like this in veterinary medicine. So I picked up the phone and it’s been so easy to work with the people at Cemplicity to get this delivering the LOAD tool.” says Innes. “I was drawn to the fact that the Cemplicity platform is highly regarded in healthcare and very flexible which gave me confidence it could be deployed easily in our referral setting, catering for the fact we have both a client and a patient.”