The world of veterinary medicine is busier than ever, and based on recent projections of pet ownership and veterinary team staffing, it’s only going to get more challenging! At Instinct, we’re committed to creating innovative tools that facilitate record-keeping and care planning… without getting in your way.

Veterinary nurses and technicians are key players on the veterinary team, not only fulfilling essential roles as educators and communicators for pet parents but also participating in all aspects of nursing care for their patients. Most importantly, veterinary technicians act as skilled extensions of the veterinarians themselves, freeing up veterinarians to share their focus with other patients in need.

Let’s take a look at some of the key features in Instinct that enable veterinary technicians to do their work safely and efficiently, with less wasted time (and hopefully less stress!).

Communication Tools

Every thriving medical team relies on effective communication to succeed. Practical tools can bolster your team’s communication skills, benefitting not only your people but also the patients in their care.

Assign to Me

Reduce or prevent medical errors stemming from too many helping hands.

Assign to Me allows one user to lay claim to a patient’s care, which then displays for the rest of the team. This feature doesn’t block anyone else’s access, to avoid stranding someone. Assign to Me is best used as a communication enhancer, supporting the verbal checks you’re already doing. Shift changes are easy too—the new person can unassign the first and reassign to themselves.

My Board

Keep a personalized to-do list and streamline patient rounds.

When using Assign to Me, you can pin a patient to My Board, too. That way, you can keep a running list of patients under your care or cases that need a follow-up. You can pin a patient from any other board—IP, OP, BP, and OTW.

Use this personalized list to get through patient rounds, too! From just one screen, you can easily share essential details on all your patients with the next care team, including each patient’s signalment, the reason for their visit, triage status, and in Tx view, review upcoming treatments!

Triage Tags

Keep teams informed about patient status.

Even if your hospital or clinic doesn’t need to use triage tags in the traditional sense of assigning priority to incoming patients, this communication tool can be flexible to suit your needs!

Here are a few ways we’ve seen this feature used in practice:

• Display patient status for a procedure (preops done, sedation given, in the procedure, recovering)
• Convey something specific about a patient or owner, such as financial concerns or pet to be euthanized
• Communicate unique patient metrics, like acuity scoring, anesthetic risk, or critical care level

Related Article: How Instinct Makes Work Easier for the Front Desk Team

Treatment Sheets

Well-built treatment sheets are the foundation of effective care in a veterinary hospital setting. Creating a treatment plan shouldn’t have to occupy more time than the actual treatments being performed.

Product Groups

Automate treatment sheet building and save valuable time.

Forget sketching out a list of treatments by hand or ordering treatments for every patient line-by-line. Gone are the days of missed charges because you’re so busy you forgot to charge for blood collection.

Product groups make treatment sheet ordering incredibly efficient. You can customize the content—even condition-by-condition.

For example, product groups for toxicity decontamination can include basic vitals monitoring, decontamination treatments, fluids, and (of course), emetics and anti-emetics.

Product groups for minor lacerations can include typical sedative agents, appropriate fluid setup, post-sedation vitals monitoring, and the procedure and associated materials.

Instead of creating a checklist one item at a time, every time, create the checklist once for anyone to use. This can make a powerful difference in the continuity of care and can help doctors and veterinary nurses form predictable habits.

Patient Safety

The goal in every veterinary practice is to provide top-shelf care while avoiding mistakes that could compromise patient safety. Reduce or prevent medical errors by using every safety tool available to you.

Dose Calculator

The tool you need, where you need it (no batteries required).

Every patient you admit gets weighed, so leverage that basic parameter to make dose calculations flawless. Medications in Instinct can be set up with a calculator based on product concentration, which means you can simply enter your desired dose (mg/kg or total mg) and Instinct does the math for you.

This makes dose calculation easy and reduces human error (which is never intentional and is often the result of heavy caseloads and excessive stress!)

Patient Safety Warnings (PSWs)

Protect patients from overdoses or ineffective doses.

Made to accompany the dose calculator, safety ranges can be set per species by your admins and can follow protocols your medical team agrees on, even off-label dosing if indicated.

When a dose is entered, the calculator automatically calculates and displays the total mg, mg/kg, and the formulation dose (ie, 1 tablet). If what’s entered is outside the set safety ranges, alerts can help guide the team’s decision on how to proceed.

Plumb’s Integration

Stop chasing the book around the hospital.

People at every level of the veterinary medical team have lived the “Where’s my Plumb’s book” headache. Instinct eliminates that problem by giving you direct access to the Plumb’s library of drug monographs, right when you need it.

Available in the sidebar where you can search by product name, or on the treatment sheet as you’re ordering a medication, our Plumb’s integration makes it easy to verify dosages, review contraindications, and even check up on potential interactions.

Medication guides are available too—printable, pet-owner-friendly PDFs that answer common client questions.

Invoice Streamlining

Veterinary nursing care teams have a heavy burden to bear, and checking invoices at the end of every shift can feel overwhelming. Instinct makes it easy to automate invoice creation, so you can check that task off your list just a little quicker next time.

Invoice Auditing

Spend less time staring at a screen and more time interacting with your patients.

Real-time invoice syncing or a quick and easy-to-read checklist simplifies the bill-checking process. This is particularly useful if you have team members who can be dedicated to bill auditing, even if they’re not involved in day-to-day patient care.

Because of automatic fees and the ease of building treatment sheets, as long as your hospital maintains a setup that matches your needs, the invoice should practically build itself!

Some PIMS sync with Instinct invoices, but if yours doesn’t, you can ‘check off’ the charges in Instinct as you build the chargeable invoice in your PIMS, communicating to the team on the next shift what charges have been verified and what unchecked charges remain.

Exclusive EMR Features

You can get the problem-solving features above with Instinct Treatment Plan. If you want to supercharge your whole process, Instinct EMR is the way to go.

Customizable Chart Templates

Get the answers you need by asking the right questions.

Want to make exam room ‘interrogations’ flawless? Work with your admins to build Charts that meet your needs.

Do you ask a different set of questions for a technician office visit versus a general wellness visit or a sick visit? Is there a particular exam room flow for a patient who presents with a simple laceration versus toxin exposure?

Make a chart for it! List all the essential questions and even use a drop-down list to create easy-to-answer Yes/No/Maybe questions.

This can also help with team training by guiding new staff to recognize exactly what your doctors need to know.

Completing Estimates to Tx Sheets

Seamlessly transition from approved estimates to fully built treatment plans.

Product groups are great for treatment sheets and even better for estimates, where they’ll save you time twice over. Use a product group to build the estimate itself, eliminating line-by-line work. Once the estimate’s approved, complete it to a treatment sheet and you don’t have to rebuild it all over again.

Snippets

Create repeatable chunks of text to apply from one patient to another.

No more typing out 1 (insert form) twice a day for 14 days. Give until gone. Give with food.

Use our standard snippets or create your own. Do you have a generic discharge template but need bandage instructions that you’ll use again and again for any patient whose paw got wrapped up? Make a snippet for that. Save time, energy, and the grief of a minor typing error (like ordering 1 tablet PER mouth instead of 1 tablet BY mouth.)

Ax Mode

Anesthesia Mode will make sedation and anesthesia monitoring easier on the entire surgical/ anesthesia team. Get a sneak peek at this amazing feature, and stay tuned for more!

Veterinary nurses and technicians balance so many responsibilities in veterinary medicine. They're key communicators, educators, and patient caregivers, and they play a key role in keeping appointments moving and ensuring patients get the care they need.

Instinct may have been built to replace treatment sheets, but with the launch of EMR, it has become extremely successful in enabling veterinary technicians to do their crucial work safely and efficiently, with less wasted time—and less stress.

Curious whether Instinct Treatment Plan or Instinct EMR is right for your team? Request a demo.