Red Bank Veterinary Hospital is a 24-hour emergency, critical care, and specialty care hospital located in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. Home to more than 100 doctors operating across a wide range of specialties, the hospital sees around 120,000 cases per year, or approximately 300 cases per day, making it one of the busiest small animal hospitals in the United States.
With such a heavy caseload and such a big team, efficiency is paramount. Driving that efficiency are ezyVet and Vet Radar, practice management system and patient care solution that underpin the hospital’s daily administrative and clinical operations.
We sat down with a few members of the Red Bank Veterinary Hospital team to find out how they use ezyVet and Vet Radar to save time, collaborate, and deliver exceptional patient care.
Challenges with tracking thousands of paper records
Prior to ezyVet, Red Bank Veterinary Hospital used paper records. While the team was well accustomed to the paper-heavy system, staying on top of tens of thousands of paper records was easier said than done. It wasn’t uncommon for records to get misplaced or go missing, which hindered access to information and made inter-team collaboration unnecessarily challenging.
It was time to go digital. However, when you’re operating at scale, change doesn’t always come easily. According to Red Bank Veterinary Hospital Medical Director Dr. John D. Anastasio, there were some initial doubts over whether a cloud-based system would be able to meet the needs of the hospital.
“It's a scary thing to change from one electronic medical record system to another, especially if you had a long history with the previous system,” said John. “There was some concern with regard to whether any cloud-based system could handle the volume of cases and data that we have on a daily basis.”
Through discussions with the ezyVet team, those concerns were put to rest, and the hospital decided to take the plunge and put an end to its paper records once and for all.
“The ezyVet, Vet Radar, and IDEXX teams were extraordinarily helpful. They gave us everything that we needed to be successful. The implementation went as smoothly as I could possibly imagine it would go. And since then, if we have run into any hiccups, they've been very responsive in getting those issues resolved.”
Automated appointment confirmations save $100,000 a year
Upgrading to ezyVet immediately improved the hospital’s access to information. As a cloud-based system, ezyVet ensures that every person across the hospital now has instant access to a patient’s medical records, regardless of where staff or patients are physically located.
“Now, all of our medical records are in the cloud. I can access them anywhere in the world. It's extraordinarily easy to do, and it's been very, very helpful for me in my position as Medical Director,” said John.
ezyVet hasn’t just strengthened internal lines of communication - it’s also transformed the way the hospital communicates externally with clients.
Manual confirmation calls have been replaced with automated two-way text messages, which can be sent and received directly from within ezyVet. When a client confirms the appointment, the status of the appointment is automatically updated in the team’s schedule, further reducing manual data entry. In total, John estimates that the text messaging system alone saves the hospital more than $100,000 a year while enabling front desk staff to provide better face-to-face service.
“We used to easily spend 40-plus hours a week just making confirmation calls for appointments,” recalled John. “And that has since gone away with the automated confirmations for appointments through text message. Instead of being on the phone all day trying to confirm these appointments, [our front desk staff] are able to pay more attention to the clients that are actually in the building. It's absolutely helped our ability to provide a better level of care and customer service.”
Patient care software saves 20 hours per day on anesthesia
Migrating to ezyVet has also enabled Red Bank Veterinary Hospital to leverage Vet Radar, patient care software that natively integrates with ezyVet. While ezyVet is used to manage administrative tasks, Vet Radar helps standardize and streamline the hopsital’s patient management processes.
“There are multiple places, especially in a hospital of this size, where you need to be able to update multiple people at once,” said Red Bank Veterinary Hospital Nursing Manager Sam Ballenger. “So, whether it’s the person watching the patient in the ward, the person up front trying to update the owner, the person in our call center updating the owner from home, our medical billing team, the surgeons, the doctors, the nurses, the assistants - whoever it is, they can update the patient’s treatment sheet at any time through Vet Radar.”
Seamless access to treatment sheets is particularly important when it comes to anesthetic cases. Vet Radar features real-time anesthesia graphs and built-in fluid calculators, assisting the team in tracking and administer medication accurately. Reducing the cognitive load on the team allows the staff to focus their time and energy on more meaningful work, which ultimately translates to superior care and improved patient outcomes.
“We're doing at least 20 anesthesia cases a day. With Vet Radar, we’re saving at least an hour per day, per technician. With 15 technicians on the team, that is a significant amount of time saved. It’s helping us in a lot of ways,” said Sam.
Vet Radar continues to evolve, with updates arriving every two weeks. As John explained, some of these updates are the direct result of Red Bank Veterinary Hospital’s feedback.
“From the day of implementation, we had ideas of how the software could be improved," said John. “Within a few months, the top several - maybe five or six - were implemented. And since then [the Vet Radar team] has made dramatic changes that have improved our patient care and the utility of the software.”
To further drive efficiency, Red Bank Veterinary Hospital utilizes CUBEX, a controlled substance management solution. Drugs that are used in treatments are automatically logged and added to the patient’s invoice, simplifying dispensing processes while maximizing billing accuracy and eliminating labor-intensive processes like inventory tracking and reordering.
Diagnostic integration delivers faster turnaround times
Another feature that has contributed to Red Bank Veterinary Hospital’s ability to provide outstanding care is ezyVet’s integration with IDEXX Reference Laboratories. The two-way integration allows the team to send diagnostic requests and receive results directly within ezyVet, improving turnaround times and eliminating the previously paper-heavy processes.
“There's a little link tab within the diagnostic results section of ezyVet that will bring you right to IDEXX VetConnect PLUS and it has all of your results over time. We use that to look at trends for our patients. It's been extraordinarily helpful,” explained John.
Red Bank Veterinary Hospital uses Vet Rocket as its PACS server and PACS viewer. Vet Rocket integrates with ezyVet, allowing the team to access diagnostic images directly from the diagnostic results section of ezyVet. Meanwhile, the hospital’s radiologists utilize IDEXX’s VetMedStat to view imaging studies and write reports, which are automatically integrated back into ezyVet where they can be easily accessed from the diagnostic results section.
“The integration between IDEXX and ezyVet is seamless,” said John. “If you're thinking about changing electronic medical record systems, I strongly recommend the cloud-based system. I don’t think there’s any question that the utility of a cloud-based system is greater than a server-based system. Our experience with ezyVet and Vet Radar, especially with the IDEXX integration, has been exemplary.”
Looking ahead
Red Bank Veterinary Hospital has plans to move to a massive new 100,000-square-foot premises in the spring of 2024 - an exciting upgrade that will enable the hospital to provide even better levels of care and service. ezyVet and Vet Radar will be there every step of the way as the hospital grows, providing the team with the state-of-the-art tools they need to thrive while managing one of the heaviest caseloads in North America.
Want to see what ezyVet could do for your practice? Book a demo today to discover how ezyVet could help your hospital save time, drive revenue, and better serve your patients.