Removed Duplicate Historical Medial Records

 

As of June 23rd, copied legacy 'MedARKS extracts' will not list as duplicate records in ZIMS Medical -  Medical Sharing available .

Contact Species360 Support

 

Problem: 
“I can no longer find the historical medical records for an animal that I received from another institution!  I know these records were in the system.”

Reason: 
MedARKS was a strictly localized system.  When you received an animal from another MedARKS institution, you would receive a file with the medical records for that animal and those records would get loaded into your local MedARKS.  Now this process meant that there were now 2 copies of those records in existence – your copy and the original records at the previous institution.  Initially, when institutions were migrated to ZIMS, we loaded all records for an institution, including those records that were copies of records from another institution.  This meant that ZIMS had duplicate records in the system, but it eased the transition from MedARKS to ZIMS as the local copies of the duplicate records stayed visible to you.  However, as of 23 Jun 2015, the duplicated anesthesia, diagnosis, prescription, sample, test/result, and physiological measurement records have been removed from the system.  The original medical records, migrated from the previous holding institution, are still in the system but may currently not be visible to you.

How do I get to see the medical history on these animals from another ZIMS institution?
Sharing of medical records between ZIMS institutions became supported as part of ZIMS release 2.1.  You are probably familiar with sharing because the only means to see the historical medical records on an animal received after you went live in ZIMS for medical, was through the medical record sharing function.  So, if you no longer can see historical records on an animal, you just need to contact the institution(s) that previously held the animal and get them to turn on medical record sharing for that animal . More on  sharing records in ZIMS Medical .

How do I easily find out which institutions have medical records that they could share? 
Go into ZIMS medical records and bring the animal in question into focus.  On the right side of the screen, look for this icon (next to the Holder & Owner labels).  The number in the center represents the total number of institutions that have held this animal.  If that number is greater than 1, click on the icon.  

You will see a popup like the one shown below:


This tells you that there are 111 medical records about this animal at Santa Barbara, that are not current shared with the your institution.   Contact this institution and ask them to share the medical records on this animal.  Once that has happened, the medical history of this animal will be visible to you.  If you have questions about medical records sharing, contact your ZIMS support person.

Why the change now?
ZIMS is a global system and one of the advantages is that it becomes much easier to perform an analysis of the global data set.  All MedARKS and ZIMS users should be familiar with the Reference Intervals for many blood tests – these reference intervals were calculated from the global data set.  ZIMS release 2.2 adds another analysis of global data – the Drug Usage Extracts which provide information on which drugs have been used in which species, along with dosage and duration information as well as the occurrence of adverse effects recorded for these drugs.  The future will bring analysis of anesthesia information and diagnosis information.  Statistical analysis of all these global medical records would be flawed if duplicate records were included in the analysis.  When combined with the ability to share records between ZIMS institutions, the time had arrived for these duplicate records to be removed from the ZIMS system.

 

Revised 5 March 2025
* Species360 Organizational name change added on 07/18/2016