Based in sunny Orange County, California, Dr. Tony Cambridge and the Veterinary Surgical Specialists team support local primary care veterinarians by providing the very best surgical expertise in orthopedic, soft tissue, neurologic, oncologic and cardiothoracic procedures. Tony and the team moved to ezyVet in 2018, after intensive research into cloud-based practice management software. They sought a flexible solution that would automate out manual processes and collate results from lab equipment. With ezyVet, they’ve unified a jumble of separate applications, streamlining them into a single clear picture.
We caught up with Dr. Cambridge to discuss what the team at Veterinary Surgical Specialists loves most from the switch to cloud-based veterinary software – from accessing a complete medical record remotely to cutting all data entry out of the operating room.
Tell us about Veterinary Surgical Specialists, Tony. What is your team all about?
At Veterinary Surgical Specialists, our philosophy is quite simple – we just want to do the best we can and give the best patient care. It is what we strive for and that has been our success. Essentially, at VSS we can offer any form of surgery – from total hip replacements through to minimally invasive surgery, along with arthroscopy and laparoscopy.
Why did you decide to move to cloud-based practice management software?
Our team runs surgery 24 hours a day, so we have staff working around the clock, in theater and at the front desk. We are a tight team – many of us have been here for over a decade – and work together at pace. There was a shared feeling among us that the old software was no longer working.
We were doing a lot of manual inputting and needed a hand. We also felt that we were not being listened to. Our system was such that it was isolated and not evolving from the other systems that were around us. We would have to manually enter patient information into multiple systems – do things like maintaining an extra laboratory system just for medical record imaging requests. All of those were manual forms that had to be completed.
ezyVet crept into our thought process as we looked at what other veterinary software was available in the marketplace. What captivated us was the company’s willingness to hear what we wanted, rather than tell us what it did. ezyVet wanted to know what our team needed to do with the software, bending it, manipulating it, and creating new features. They really worked with us in the way we had always wanted.
While we might all be using the same software, we all want slightly different things from it. That’s why being able to customize the software to suit our needs is key.
How has the move to cloud-based software improved your systems?
We now have one clear and complete picture. Prior to joining ezyVet we had an operating system that required us to look for patient information in many places. It wasn’t centrally collated, so we would have to open a different file, or go to a different location every time we wanted to look at a record. For example, we might have had to search in an entirely different system for X-rays – but that has now been replaced by one centrally focused system.
What I love now, is that I can scroll through a medical record and, before my eyes, I can immediately see the complete medical picture. That, to a surgeon’s brain, is a phenomenal situation because I now spend very little time getting maximum amount of information, whereas before it was it was a real hurdle.
We are also getting great feedback from our referral GPs and partners on how clean and easy to read our reports are. With ezyVet we can customize our forms by procedure, animal type, referring doctor, location and more. Each of us can create those forms to our specifications and extract that data from their practice. Requesting data is also so simple – it’s just a click away.