Cool new products

One of the coolest aspects of my job is seeing all the great new products that arrive every year from our drug companies to help us help our pets. Right now Ventana Animal Hospital is assessing two new drugs to establish how helpful they will be to our clients.

A fair amount goes into any decision to carry a new medication. We must ask and answer several questions before we even consider bringing a new medication into our hospital.

First and foremost, does it solve a problem that cannot otherwise be solved. If we carried every cool drug out there we would have no room to treat pets, and we would be broke because all our money would be tied up on our shelves. Many drugs are redundant, or they cover the same ground as older drugs, or they have one small change over an existing drug - in these cases, there would have to be a very compelling reason to add them to our pharmacy. We are only interested in truly breakout drugs or innovations that really make a difference to your  life or the lives of your pets.

Second we ask ourselves what the research really says. Many medications, especially ones that people hear about on the internet or from the media are poorly or not at all supported by the science. We only bring in new medications that have been FDA approved, which mean that they have undergone extensive research into efficacy and safety. Even after undergoing FDA scrutiny we will oftentimes wait on a medication until others have used it for a while.

Lastly, we look at cost and need. Just because a medication is effective, it's use might be so limited that we would never use it, or use it so rarely that we could never use all of the product before it expired on our shelf. We also look at cost. If a medication is prohibitively expensive and it is not a huge improvement on existing medications we will not carry it.

So, what cool medications are we looking at right now?

First we are looking at a new flea and tick product called NexGard. Unlike every other flea and tick product on the market, this one is not topical. Instead of having insecticides on your dog - and your hands and furniture - the dog eats a chewable tablet once monthly. The tablet contains a naturally occurring insecticidal molecule - found, interestingly enough in living sponges to kill sea snails which will eat them otherwise.

In addition to NexGard we are also studying a new medication released by Zooetis for skin allergies. This medication has already been used successfully by local dermatology specialists. The product is called Apoquel. We are still looking into some of the details of this medication, how, exactly, it works, safety, dosing etc...

Every month we receive notice of some new medication, protocol, or gadget. We try to think about how these products can improve the quality of care that we offer. We rarely end up pursuing these new things because they often do not meet our criteria, so it exciting that we are looking at two new products at the same time.

Ventana Animal Hospital - a snapshot

The great thing about our computer system (now a year old) is that it affords us the opportunity to really examine what we do on a daily basis. With a few clicks of a button I could tell you how many pills to treat valley fever we sold last week (985), or how many bags of prescription cat food we currently have in the building (21).

I may have had ugly battles with math in college, but when it comes to these kind of details I'm hopelessly enamored.

What we have not set up in our system is a diagnosis protocol that will tell me what the doctors said your pet has - this is often different than what you say your pet has. A coughing pet, for example is not diagnosed with a cough (which is a symptom) but with valley fever, or cardiac disease or collapsing trachea or something more obscure.

However, in the meantime, I have an even more interesting - at least as far as you may be concerned - database to mine: Presenting Complaints. Now, presenting complaints are not entirely scientific and can be wildly misleading as far as telling us about what is really going on in the population is concerned. A perfect example of this would be routine well care visits. The purpose of a routine well care visit is to look for things that may be wrong and address them - we know that - but the computer simply states: Exam.

However, presenting complaints tells us what you see as wrong with your pets. The chart below is a snapshot of presenting complaints over the past few weeks.


 



It shows us that most of our pets are healthy (YAY!). Well Care includes puppy and kitten care, vaccines and other exams. Now, just because someone says that they're here for an exam, that doesn't mean that we didn't diagnose ear, skin, or dental disease (the most common). Again, diagnosis is a whole different animal from presenting complaint.

Second, and not surprisingly are ears, eyes and skin, with the lion's share falling evenly between ears and skin. Skin can include anything from allergic dermatitis to lumps and bumps. Skin issues seemed to fall largely 60-30 in favor of allergy type issues over lumps and bumps.

GI issues come in right behind ears, eyes and skin. Pets get into things and then often have cause to regret it. Most GI issues are straight forward, and several were puppies with known parasite infestations.

Sick (general) is largely a grab bag called loosely defined in-hospital as ADR. ADR is veterinary-speak for 'Ain't Doing Right'. How many of these ended up being valley fever I have no idea, but it would be a fair estimation that at least a quarter were.

Blood work includes cases of routine follow up blood work for valley fever, diabetes, hypo and hyperthyroidism and the like, as well as diagnostic testing where the next thing on the list was blood work, and therefore the client asked for it by name.

Lameness falls into several categories: cuts and scrapes on the feet, and soft tissue injuries and fractures. Some of these may have ended up being diagnosed as valley fever too.

Dental care includes both preventive dentistry ("It's time for Fluffy to have her teeth cleaned again") and diseased dentistry (diseased gums, loose teeth and fractured teeth).

Last is surgery, I included spays and neuters - which was the bulk of our surgery over the past few weeks - as well as other surgeries triggered by disease and injury.

Again, this is hardly scientific, but it is a fairly representative snapshot of why we see pets on a regular basis. Of course some weeks are different than others. The snapshot I showed you would have included three drop-offs for hospitalization on the same day - something far outside the norm, and may be a bit shy of skin issues.

Regardless of the limitations of this little exercise, I hope that you found it as interesting as I did.

Thanks, and have a great day,
Liane

Digital X-rays

Ventana Animal Hospital is proud to announce one of the many changes that we are constantly making to provide our patients the best diagnostics available. One of these advancements is our new digital radiology capability.

If you have been to your own physician recently for X-rays, you may have seen the bright clear, and immediate results produced by digital radiology.

These images are vastly superior to film radiology, providing our doctors better visual interpretation. They are also produced faster and with no developing materials in the building, are safer for both the staff and the environment.

Additionally, since our staff members have to position your pet for X-rays, the introduction of digital radiology lowers the radiation exposure for pet and staff alike.

Radiology is one of the most important factors in accurate diagnostics for a slew of injuries and diseases. We here at Ventana Animal Hospital are proud of this new technology and the quality care that it provides for your furry family members.