Customer story

How Dr. Pierce improved Vet Tech Productivity while Saving Money with Moichor

Collaborator:

Dr. Karra Pierce, DVM, CWR Jessica Ransier, LVT, CWR

Clinic:

The success story takes place at the WIldlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro, Virginia.

Customer story

How Dr. Pierce improved Vet Tech Productivity while Saving Money with Moichor

Collaborator:

Dr. Karra Pierce, DVM, CWR Jessica Ransier, LVT, CWR

Clinic:

The success story takes place at the WIldlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro, Virginia.

Enhanced staff efficiency

Cost savings

Consistent results

Introduction

News travels fast in the veterinary wildlife sphere, and that’s where Dr. Karra Pierce, Director of Veterinary Services at the Wildlife Center of Virginia first heard of Moichor from a former student of hers. But it wasn’t until Dr. Pierce was faced with a staffing shortage and a strong demand for animal diagnostics that she reached out to Moichor. 

“We see about 3,800 cases a year, and a large volume of those are avian, reptile, and small mammals, so they have some specialized requirements that we really pride ourselves on doing a lot of diagnostics for,” Dr. Pierce said. 

Even though the Wildlife Center runs animal diagnostics in-house, Dr. Pierce and her team were unable to keep up with their patients’ diagnostics needs. 

Challenges

Staffing

Staffing shortages put pressure on Dr. Pierce’s techs two to three vet techs starting during COVID. After several months of shortages, Dr. Pierce and her technicians admitted that they could not keep up with the pace of care plus running veterinary diagnostics. “If I only have one technician, I don't want them to spend eight hours in the lab when they could be in surgery helping me do that.”

Cost

In addition to staffing issues around diagnostics, Dr. Pierce admits that being a non-profit requires cost-conscious measures, and corporate labs could not meet the Wildlife Center’s fiscal needs. 

“I only have so much money to spend on diagnostics, and I need to be mindful of where I spend that money,” Dr. Pierce said. “So my option was do I run no lab work, or do I sacrifice my technicians?” 

Veterinary intern Dr. Olivia (pictured left) performing an ocular evisceration on an Eastern Screech owl while veterinary technician supervisor Jessica Ransier (pictured right) runs anesthesia.


How Moichor Saves Dr. Pierce and Her Staff Time

Luckily Dr. Pierce had to sacrifice neither technician nor diagnostics. The quality of vet tech conditions has a direct correlation with patient care quality, and that’s why Veterinary Technician Supervisor Jessica Ransier, LVT, CWR, says Moichor enhanced her ability to spend more time with patients and assist Dr. Pierce. 

“We have a backlog of procedures that take precedence over the diagnostics, and when we have to run them in-house, it's very time consuming. Moichor cuts down the diagnostics processing at a fraction of the time; it takes two seconds to make a slide, and to fill a crit tube is faster than if we were running that CBC in-house. The only other step is just filling out the submittal form and packing up the boxes to send Moichor,” said Ransier. 

Cutting down on in-house veterinary diagnostics times allowed Ransier and her fellow vet techs to divert necessary human capital to patient-centric care.

“I think that Moichor is an incredibly valuable resource for us to have as technicians because it saves us so much time which benefits our patients. Ultimately, the other techs and I are then able to spend more time working on the things that we are uniquely qualified for like running anesthesia, participating in an orthopedic procedure, or other clinical endeavors rather than doing CBCs,” said Ransier.

How much faster is submitting CBCs for Ransier and colleagues now? Rather than taking one hour to submit four CBCs, one tech can easily submit a minimum of eight or more, and according to Dr. Pierce, the center is saving technicians ten to twenty hours of labor by sending diagnostics to Moichor rather than running them in-house. 

Ransier (pictured right) prepping bear cub to take to surgery for a fractured humerus

 
Another way Moichor enhanced productivity for the Wildlife Center of Virginia is through its online platform’s ability to aid emerging veterinarians. The Center is also a teaching hospital, and according to Dr. Pierce, the user-friendly interface makes it easy for her veterinary interns to be part of the diagnostics process.

“They're the ones who have to interpret everything and come up with the comments, so it's been nice for them to see the actual cell images and have a Moichor pathologist corroborate their findings because I don't always have time as their supervisor to recheck every single CBC they've interpreted,” Dr. Pierce said.

How Moichor Saves Money for the Wildlife Center of Virginia

Beyond boosting technician productivity, acting as a teaching tool, and saving time overall, Moichor offers the Wildlife Center of Virginia one of the most valuable benefits in veterinary care: cost savings.

“We appreciate the fact that the tests are extremely inexpensive,” said vet tech Ransier. Dr. Pierce adds, “It really has allowed me to run more diagnostics.

In addition to running more diagnostics for cheaper, Moichor’s accuracy is another feature that allows Dr. Pierce and her team to order fewer tests to confirm diagnoses.

“The results have been consistent with what I would expect. Initially I was concerned that using an external lab might produce different results from what I'm used to seeing from my technicians. But the consistency has been across the board; I wouldn't know if a CBC was run by my techs or Moichor since the results seem so similar,” Dr. Pierce said.

Ransier working with an adult bobcat that was admitted to the Wildlife Center of Virginia; the animal is under general anesthesia to perform its intake exam including radiographs and other procedures.


Having one lab that can service all of the Wildlife Center’s CBCs also saves money. When asked what species Dr. Pierce and her team sees, she provides a long list: kestrels, barn owls, eagles, black bears, box turtles, hognose snakes, black rat snakes, great horned owls, deer, falcons, opossums, peregrine falcons, red tail hawks, turkey vultures, and more. Moichor’s commitment to building the world’s largest reference interval library ties in well with Dr. Pierce’s diverse set of patients. 

To keep reading more in depth this customer story go to:

See side-by-side study

Dr. Karra Pierce
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DVM, CWR

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