Establishing a minimum database as part of preventive care
Discover how diagnostic health screening can help you detect and treat diseases early and educate your clients on their pets’ health
Sponsored by Zoetis
Adam Christman, DVM, MBA
Hey everyone, welcome back. In this episode, we're gonna talk about the tried and true proactive approach to veterinary health care. So, we know how important preventative care is in veterinary medicine friends, especially with vaccination, unhealthy diets, parasite control, the list goes on. I would like to focus on a different area diagnostic health screening. So, this includes a CBC, chem profile, urinalysis, fecal testing. So, Dr. Wolfe, how do you define preventive care in your hospital? And how important is this to both you and your clients?
Shelli Wolfe, DVM, MBA
Preventative health care in our practice is defined as a minimum database. As you said, it's going to include a CBC, a chemistry A urinalysis with a SediVue, fecal flotation. And then for dogs, a vector borne testing. And then for cats retrovirals testing. We're going to try to start that young and consistently do that yearly. And it's going to help us establish a baseline. But also, it's going to help us try to catch illness and disease early, which is then going to help us institute treatment early and overall going to improve the both the length and the quality of our patients lives.
Adam Christman, DVM, MBA
Yeah, absolutely. catch it early. Dr. Penn, we know it's so important to understand what normal parameters are in our patients. So how important is it for our clients to understand these results for their pets?
Cory Penn, DVM
Yeah, I think it's really important, right? And to Dr. Wolfe's point, we want to really follow those life guidelines set forth by AHAA, and that really gives us a baseline for each individual pet moving forward. So, when we say, "Hey, we're going to be doing this diagnostic workup," ideally, on these recommended timelines, whether that's a yearly or every six months, depending on the age of the pet, we can really know what is normal for that pet. We know that there's reference intervals for all of these different tasks, whether that's hematology or chemistry or urinalysis. I love that you don't end that sentence with CBC, chemistry. It's always a urinalysis too right, to be able to interpret that chemistry, but that allows us to trend those results and know, hey, this liver enzyme is slightly out of the normal reference range, but it's not that different from where it was six months ago or a year ago. So that's actually pretty normal for this pet. Or on the other side of that this kidney value has risen dramatically. And we know that creatinine was, it's not quite out of the reference range, right, but this is a dramatic change for this particular patient we can really dig into to why that is and interpret that and then come up with that plan moving forward, Dr. Christman.
Adam Christman, DVM, MBA
Yeah, love it.
