InfoVet Web Hosting

Infovet is a web-hosted software program developed by Pfizer NZ which is designed to efficiently aggregate dairy farm herd health and production data from various sources with the permission of the farmer and associated veterinarian. The data is accessible only by the individual farmers veterinarians. The current main sources of information are MINDA (LIC database), Fencepost (Fonterra) , herd tests and vet clinic computer systems (e.g. laboratory results, product purchases, visit information etc). Franklin Veterinary Services, a large south Auckland and north Waikato practice with 11 farm vets and some 350 dairy herds as clients has operated Infovet for two years, using Toughbook laptops in the field.

Infovet is a software development to enable veterinarians to manage the information base of their dairy farm clients and thereby strengthening their ability to solve their clients animal health problems, especially those that are complex, costly and frustrating like mastitis, reproductive failure, metabolic disease and lameness.

Once the information is stored and collated, it can be mined for benchmarking, possible links between diseases and causes, and generate alerts for early recognition and intervention of possible animal health problems on the farm.

Infovet regularly synchronises and then scans the stored data every day and sends alerts by email.

Vets, in consultation with farmers, can set custom health alerts for a huge variety of variables to keep a watching eye over the farm. Action plans can easily be produced and progress monitored. Local benchmarking is also possible, giving the farmer a valuable insight into the herd performance.

Data can be recorded cow side by the vet, e.g. pregnancy tests or body condition score results. Pregnancy testing data can also be sent from Infovet back up into MINDA to save the farmer having to enter the data. The laptops running Infovet can be used on- or off-line. In the case of off-line, the new data is sent back to storage when the laptop is next docked.Panasonic Toughbooks are used routinely but vets on farm for this purpose and despite some horrific stories of hardware abuse they have not managed to kill a Toughbook. Toughbook ruggedised notebooks are used in industries where conventional notebooks are not able to operate such as the outdoors (wet / dusty / humid) typically found in the farming sector.

These have touch screen data entry and are linked to portable printers.

Farm vets work with large amounts of figures and results to try and solve animal health problems. Infovet presents that information on every cow. A good example of the power of Infovet is managing the information required to solve mastitis problems on a dairy farm. The important data resides in various databases. Individual somatic cell count records and calving dates reside in the herd-improvement organisations, bulk milk somatic cell count data in the dairy company databases and laboratory , consultation and animal treatment purchase records within the vet practice databases. Infovet unites all this information, analyses and reports it to veterinarians to quickly and effectively aid problem solving and decision-making with respect to a farm's mastitis management programme.