Animal Welfare Professionals

Hi! We are about to open our free/low cost community wellness program where we will be providing vaccinations, flea/tick prevention/ dewormer, heartworm tests, parvo tests, FIV/leuk tests and other very basic vetting. We currently use Shelterluv for our in house management software but we are hoping to find a separate program to use for keeping track of our community wellness program clients and their animals while also able to print medical/vaccine records for them. It is proving difficult to get demo's set up with most veterinary software companies, does anyone have a suggestion on programs that would work for this? I know we could technically do it all through shelterluv but I am having issues figuring out how to set it up. Any advide would be much appreciated!

#CommunityPartnerships*
#DataandTechnology

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Desiree Flanery
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We use ShelterBuddy, and it has a great Clinic section that is pretty easy to use. I've also found their help site and customer service to be super helpful (customer service is very responsive, usually less than 24 hours!). We don't have a publicly available clinic/vet, but we use the Clinic area to add animal information that we get from owner before their intake/surrender appointment. Part of what we like for Shelterbuddy is that it has our shelter-owned animals, public pets/people, and volunteers (VolunteerBuddy add-on) all in one location. 

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Erin Dams
Operations Director
Roanoke Valley SPCA
Roanoke VA
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Hi Desiree, 

I don't have any good advice! Instead, I'd love to ask what steps you took successfully to be able to open this clinic.. Are you renting a physical space? What sort of initial grant funding did you receive perhaps from your city, state, or donors? How are you purchasing the vaccinations?

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Farrah Goff
President
10 Lives Rescue NY Inc
NY
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Hi! We are using our existing facility for the actual clinic space, though it is small and we are in the process of renovating a 16x20 building on our property that will be used as our primary medical building. We are actually receiving private funding from a foundation that helps fund our organization quarterly for this clinic. They will be fully funding it, thankfully. Unfortunately, we are located in a very rural Appalachian area and we serve three states (OH, WV, and KY) and a lot of counties in WV and KY do not have shelters or even access to veterinary care withing 2+ hours in some areas. We are just in a very poverty stricken area in general, so it may not be fancy or state of the art but it will do! Our main goal in doing this is to help people in our area retain their pets and to improve quality of life for pets in our area that otherwise would suffer. We had 25 dogs and 30 cats dumped at our facility within a 2-3 month period over the summer and they were all medical disasters, but if they would have just had some basic care they wouldn't have been such a mess. 

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Desiree Flanery
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-12-2025 07:45 AM
From: Farrah Goff
Subject: Veterinary software for Free/Low cost community wellness program?

Hi Desiree, 

I don't have any good advice! Instead, I'd love to ask what steps you took successfully to be able to open this clinic.. Are you renting a physical space? What sort of initial grant funding did you receive perhaps from your city, state, or donors? How are you purchasing the vaccinations?

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Farrah Goff
President
10 Lives Rescue NY Inc
NY
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Take a look at Rescue Groups--it might possibly be made to work in this context.  If you pay the small fee for the Data Management package, you will be able to track all of your vet care, your client contact info, add in reminders for your staff to reach out to clients.  It allows you to connect dogs to adopters/owners.  It also allows you to print a vet care report using the "journal" function on the "kennel card" -- which then will have a picture of the dog, their chip number, and all of the other info you input (which is incredibly useful if that dog later ends up stray in the shelter system, as you'll have their chip and photo on file to get them home very quickly).  We print out one of these reports to go in the adoption packet we send home, so I think it would work okay to send to owners.  It's mildly annoying that it's not organized chronologically but by category (e.g., all the  rabies vax boosters are grouped).

If you do microchip implanting as part of the clinic work, you can have Rescue Groups automatically register the chips once they're connected to the owner's record.  Datamars/Petlink has phenomenal shelter reps for low-cost chips without the commitment to one ecosystem 24PW tries to impose.

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Maggie Thomas
President
Red Stick German Shepherd Rescue
LA
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