What to hand a new veterinarian when you change clinics

You move house, or a practice closes, or you finally admit that the drive is too far. Now there is a new clinic, and the first appointment starts with a question nobody enjoys: what has happened to this animal so far.

The honest answer for most households is "some of it is in a folder, some of it is in an email, and some of it is in my head". This article is about turning that into something a new veterinarian can actually use, in the order it matters.

The four things a new clinic asks for first

Every practice has its own intake process, but the same four things come up.

• Vaccinations, with dates. Not "he is up to date". The product name and the date it was given, because the next due date is calculated from them, and because a kennel or a groomer will ask for the certificate separately.
• Current medications, with directions. The drug, the strength, the direction as written, and whether it is still being given. A dose you stopped two months ago matters as much as the one you are still giving.
• Recent laboratory work, with its own reference intervals. A value without the interval that came with it is half a result. The interval belongs to the laboratory that ran the sample, so it has to travel with the number.
• The visit history. What happened, when, and what the veterinarian wrote at the time. An assessment written by the person who examined the animal is worth more than any summary of it.

Imaging is a fifth, and it is a different problem, because studies are large files and every practice handles them differently. Ask the old clinic how they can send them, and expect it to be slower than the rest.

Ask the old clinic before you need it

Ask for the complete record, not a summary. Ask for it as files rather than as a printout, and ask for PDFs rather than photographs of pages if the clinic offers a choice. A PDF that was generated by a practice system carries a real text layer, so the characters in it are the actual characters. A photograph of the same page is an image of characters, and reading it is guesswork with good handwriting.

Give it more time than seems reasonable. Practices are busy, the request usually goes to one person, and the first appointment at the new clinic is a bad moment to discover that nothing arrived.

Check four things when it arrives

A record that arrives is not the same as a record that is usable. Before you file it, look for:

• Dates on everything. A value with no date cannot be placed on a timeline. Talli will not date a document for you: if a page does not say what day it is from, the values it carries wait until somebody says.
• Units. The same analyte is printed in different units by different laboratories. The unit is part of the value.
• Reference intervals next to laboratory results. If they were stripped out of a summary, ask for the original report.
• Whether medications are current. Old records are full of prescriptions that ended. A list that does not distinguish is a list that will be misread.

Putting it into Talli

Upload the files, or photograph the pages you only have on paper. The record is filed against the pet, and the values read out of each document are traceable back to the page they came from, so a number on a chart can always be opened to see the original.

A pile of history behaves slightly differently from a single new report, in two ways that are worth knowing.

First, anything the pipeline is not confident about waits in a review queue rather than being filed on a guess. With a decade of records arriving at once, expect that queue to have things in it. Each entry is a specific question rather than a generic error: what day is this document from, what kind of document is this, is what we read correct, is this a duplicate, does this disagree with something already on file. Answering them is a tap each, and it is the point rather than a defect.

Second, a historical weight will not be compared against today's weight. A reading is checked against the nearest reading on the same chart, on either side in time, because a history import files values dated years ago and the reading that constrains one of those is its neighbour rather than the most recent one. A value that is genuinely impossible for the animal is held with the bound it failed named, so a person can settle it. It is not written at a lower confidence and it is not corrected for you.

Sending it on to the new clinic

Once it is in one place, you have two ways of handing it over, and they suit different situations.

A scoped link shows only what you chose, expires on the date you set, and can be revoked at any time. Every attempt to open it is recorded, including the attempts that fail. Five scopes can be sent:

• the vaccination record, which is what a kennel or a groomer asks for
• the full record, which is what a new clinic wants
• current medications, which is what a sitter or a boarding kennel needs
• chosen laboratory panels, for a specialist or a second opinion
• chosen documents

You can set a password and a view limit on the link. If you do not set a lifetime it gets 30 days rather than forever, because an unbounded link to a medical record is almost never what anybody meant. Anything outside the scope you chose reads as "not shared" to the recipient rather than as empty, so a kennel holding a vaccination link cannot widen it into the whole record.

An exported file suits the practices that want a document rather than a link. There are four: a vaccination record and a full record as PDFs, laboratory results as a CSV with their units, and the stored imaging as a ZIP with a manifest of what each file is.

Which to use is mostly about what the other side asked for. A link is better when you want the access to end, and a file is better when it has to be attached to something.

Two things worth doing at the first appointment

Take the medication list as it exists today, not as you remember it. If you have been recording doses, the schedule and what actually happened are both there, and "she refused it twice last week" is a more useful sentence than "she has been on it a while".

And bring the original reports rather than your notes about them. The new veterinarian is going to want to see the flag the laboratory printed and the interval it printed it against, for exactly the reasons that make a reference interval a laboratory's property rather than a universal fact.

What Talli does not do here

It does not connect to a practice's own system. There is no clinic integration, and the upload route refuses that channel outright, so records get in the way you would expect: a file, a photograph, or a form you fill in.

It does not read a scan or a photograph on its own. Text is read out of a PDF's own text layer, and anything that came through a camera goes to a person before it is filed.

And it does not decide anything clinical. It keeps the record, shows you where each value came from, and makes it possible to hand the whole thing to the person who does.