VTA Agenda
Data Standards & Interoperability
Veterinary information should be easier to exchange, understand and use safely across practices, systems and services.
The problem
A patient's clinical history may pass through several different systems over its lifetime. Primary-care practices, referral hospitals, emergency services, laboratories and other providers may each store information differently.
Changing practice management software can introduce another set of difficulties.
Important information may need to be transferred through PDFs, spreadsheets, document scans or manual re-entry.
These approaches can preserve some information, but they do not always preserve the structure, context or relationships between clinical records.
The consequences are practical: additional work for veterinary teams, delays in transferring information and the risk that clinically relevant details become harder to find or interpret.
What needs to change
Common clinical data definitions
The industry needs to examine how core veterinary information is represented, including patient identification, species, clinical history, consultations, diagnoses, medication, procedures, laboratory results and relevant clinical attachments. Common definitions would allow different systems to interpret exchanged information more consistently.
Reliable data portability
Practices need workable ways to retrieve and transfer their records when changing systems or moving patients between providers. The discussion should cover the completeness of exports, preservation of clinical history, attachments, data provenance and the practical requirements for a successful migration.
Secure, documented integrations
Practice management systems increasingly interact with specialist clinical tools, laboratories, communications platforms, imaging systems and other services. The VTA should explore reasonable expectations for documented interfaces, secure authentication, permissions, integration support and access arrangements.
Continuity of patient care
Data exchange is not only a software migration issue. A referral, emergency consultation or transfer of care may require information from different organisations. The association should consider how interoperability can improve the availability and usefulness of that information.
Appropriate control and permitted use
The rights and responsibilities associated with veterinary records vary by jurisdiction and context. Any proposed standard must address confidentiality, security, lawful access, consent where relevant, auditability and restrictions on secondary data use. Greater interoperability must not mean unrestricted access.
Questions for members
- What information should every veterinary system be able to export reliably?
- Which existing clinical and technical standards can be adopted or adapted rather than recreated?
- What information is commonly lost or degraded during practice migrations?
- What is a reasonable baseline for secure integration between veterinary software products?
- How should practices, clinicians and animal owners understand their rights and responsibilities when data is transferred?
- Where could a common standard deliver a practical benefit without imposing unreasonable costs?
What we want to work towards
An evidence-based, vendor-neutral approach to veterinary data exchange, informed by existing standards and tested against real workflows.
Possible work includes defining a minimum clinical export, documenting common veterinary terminology and testing interoperability between willing suppliers.
The VTA is not proposing a centralised database of every animal's medical history or a compulsory technology platform.
Our concern is whether relevant information can move safely and usefully between the people and systems authorised to use it.
Data Ownership And Transparency
Discussion should include ownership and licensing of clinical and practice data, transparency about secondary use or sale, and animal owners' access to records. Rights and responsibilities vary by jurisdiction and context; these questions do not imply unrestricted access or a single global legal rule.
Existing Work And Proposals
Work on veterinary data interoperability is already taking place across the industry and research community. The VTA aims to examine relevant existing approaches, identify where they may be complementary and encourage collaboration rather than unnecessary duplication.
Contributed proposals are starting points for discussion and do not imply endorsement or adoption by the association.
Vet Data Standards publishes proposals covering patient records, practice migration and business configuration. These are external proposals, not VTA specifications.
Read The Vet Data Standards Supporting Resource →Membership is open
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