ZIMS Diagnosis and Procedures
Diagnosis and procedures have a set of business rules that must be observed, or you will receive a warning message and not be able to validate what you have entered.
Review the business rules here
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Topics:
Marking Invalid and Deleting Records
Searching for Diagnosis or Procedure Records
From the ZIMS Medical Dashboard, you will find a search option for Diagnosis & Procedures in the lower left panel. Here you can search for previous Diagnosis & Procedures.
You can search by:
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Record Scope
(Local or Shared or both) - Clinical/Biopsy origin
- Invalid Records
- By animal/taxonomy
- Concern/Procedure type
- (Multiple with “OR” search)
- Active Records
- Onset Date Range
- Resolution Date Range
- Responsible Clinician
- Confidence Level
Adding a Diagnosis or Procedure Record
To add a new Diagnosis and Procedure record, from the Medical Dashboard in ZIMS click New, Diagnosis & Procedure, or press ‘Shift & D’
The Add Diagnosis & Procedures pop-up box will appear.
- Enter the Animal ID to add the Diagnosis or Procedure to. The Animal ID will default to the record you have open in ZIMS Medical, so make sure to change it if it is for another animal.
Note: you can also add the Diagnosis or Procedure to multiple animals through a Batch
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Enter the Onset Date, Time and Responsible Clinician.
Note: These will default based on user preference for responsible party and date will default based on the date of record in context (today in most cases, or health status date, or clinical note date if launched from there). - The latest Health Status will appear or ‘Add new’ if one has not been set. Clicking either Add New or the previous Health Status will bring up the Add/Edit Health Status box for you to add a new status. (See more on Health Status here ).
- Enter the Diagnosis/procedure. Choose to either enter a Quick Diagnosis/Procedure from a standardized list of terms, or add a Diagnosis with modifiers.
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Add any Notes or Comments associated with the Diagnosis or Procedure.
Note: You can validate the string of comma separated terms against the term dictionary. If a term is not in the dictionary, there is a link to add it as a new reference.
Once you have added a diagnosis, the box to add a Confidence Level will appear, as well as an option to mark the diagnosis as unresolvable. Note that these boxes will only appear if you have added a diagnosis, and do not appear if you have added a procedure.
Unresolvable is used when the diagnosis cannot be resolved and will stay with the animal, for example chronic conditions.
Click Save to save and close, or Save and Repeat to add multiple entries.
(Note: If you have added any recent Clinical Notes for this animal, you will have the option to Save and Associate, read more here ).
Create Diagnosis from a Note:
Please note you may also highlight text from a clinical note, gross necropsy report or histopathology report and right click to launch the add diagnosis screen. This may save you time.
Quick Diagnosis/procedure
Use the type-ahead field to quickly search for a standardized terms, e.g. Hoof Trim.
Medical concerns and procedures can contain modifiers. When using the Quick Diagnosis/procedure, these will need to be added one-by-one. Example: Lameness is a clinical sign that can stand on its own, but you can add mild, right front limb to give a more complete description of the concern.
Please review the business rules here .
Diagnosis with modifiers.
You can also add a Diagnosis with modifiers all in one by entering the information separated with a comma. Clicking Validate Terms will bring up possible matches of standardized terms for you to choose. Simply tick the ones you want to add, then click Select.
This will then add the diagnosis/procedures/modifiers into the Standardized terms box.
Please review the business rules here .
Health Status Conflict
If you add a Diagnosis & Procedure which conflicts with the Health Status, a warning will appear alerting you to the conflict. You should always ensure the Health Status is correct to ensure data integrity.
Clicking Yes will bring up the Add/Edit Health Status box and prefill the Status to Abnormal, and Date to the Date of Entry
Read more on Health Status in this Health Status ZIMS Help Document
Batch Diagnosis
You can add a Diagnosis & Procedure to multiple animals/groups by completing a Batch Diagnosis & Procedure. In the Add Diagnosis & Procedures pop-up, tick the Batch box (1).
Add the animals/groups to your Diagnosis by either selecting an animal list (2), entering the Local IDs manually (3), or using the Search function (4) to search for IDs to add.
Read more in the Medical Batch Actions help document .
Associating Records
Once a diagnosis or procedure is saved, you can associate (link) it with Clinical Signs, Finding entries, as well as Clinical Notes.
Within the Medical Dashboard, select the Diagnosis & Procedure you wish to associate, then when viewed in the bottom panel, click Associate.
By clicking on associate, you can select any clinical signs, findings, or notes to associate with this diagnosis or procedure. You are restricted to associations that occur recently – if the diagnosis or clinical note occurred earlier than 30 days prior to this entry the association will not be possible.
Resolving diagnosis and procedures
By clicking on resolve, you can enter a resolution date for this diagnosis or procedure.
When resolving an active problem you are presented with the option to update the health status at the same time- we recommend updating the health status as frequently as needed to accurately represent the patients current condition.
Marking Invalid – Deleting Records
There is also a concept of marking a diagnosis as invalid rather than deleting it. If a diagnosis has treatments associated with it, user may want to retain that link to validate the treatment plan as it was based on a diagnosis that was later found to be invalid.
Ex: I thought it was bacterial pneumonia and turned out to be fungal pneumonia. The bacterial pneumonia diagnosis led to a decision to treat with antibiotics. I don’t want to delete this diagnosis in favor of fungal pneumonia, but rather mark bacterial pneumonia as invalid. Alternatively, if the record was entered in error, you can delete it from the animals file.
More resources in the Training Index.
Revised 5 March 2025
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