Updated: March 14,1996

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Vetsmart - Client Server Automation System

Abstract

Industry

Services: Veterinary medicine

Business Solution

Comprehensive client-server solution automating medical, accounting, administrative, and communication functions in a collection of full-service veterinary hospitals located throughout the West Coast and beyond

Architecture

At each pet hospital a server platform running Windows NT Server connects with 10-25 client platforms running Windows for Workgroups over a NetBEUI protocol; they in turn access one central and several regional administrative servers using Remote Access Services

Products Used

Messaging API
Microsoft Developer Network
Microsoft FoxPro for Windows
Microsoft Mail
Microsoft Office Professional
Microsoft Remote Mail
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Systems Management Server
Microsoft Video
Microsoft Windows for Workgroups
Microsoft Windows NT Server

Benefit

Has enabled the development of a new business with several dozen pet hospitals across four western states and Illinois and including plans to expand to 120 pet hospitals by the end of 1997

Figure 1

In the world of small-animal veterinary medicine, it's smart to think big. At least it is for Dr. Scott Campbell, a highly successful small-animal veterinarian practicing in Portland, Oregon, and the developer of a rapidly growing collection of pet hospitals in the Chicago area and up and down the West Coast. These VetSmartTM Pet Hospital & Health Centers provide a full range of veterinary services and are managed entirely through a client-server solution based on the Microsoft® BackOffice product family.

It was in the fall of 1993 when Dr. Campbell first decided to pursue the VetSmart idea, which called for the establishment of pet hospitals at a number of nationwide PETsMART® superstores. Initially, 60 pet hospitals would open across four states, and each pet hospital eventually would employ 6 doctors and a staff of 30.

For such an ambitious venture Dr. Campbell knew he would need a comprehensive software solution, essentially automating some eight years' worth of systems already developed at his Portland pet hospital. The solution would have to support the high-quality care, customer convenience, and efficiency that had made his Portland hospital so successful. It would have to help implement his administrative vision of an essentially paperless office. At the same time it would have to ensure the pet hospitals' compliance with a stringent set of medical, legal, accounting, and quality-assurance requirements.

"We started out with Windows NT Server on an experimental basis during development and have gone for a wider and wider implementation because we have been so pleased with the results. Windows NT Server easily meets our immediate needs, and we believe that it offers far greater potential than NetWare to meet our needs in the future. Windows NT pays for itself every three months."

Mark Howard
Director of Advanced Logic
VetSmart/Medical Management International

The VetSmart solution also would need to fit smoothly into the clinical environment, offering familiar interfaces to users ranging from doctors to laboratory technicians to receptionists. It would need to be able to process information directly from such sources as stethoscopes and ECG devices. Beyond all this it would need to act as a marketing tool by educating pet owners about the importance of vaccinations and other veterinary services. This functionality would require a variety of media and input/output capabilities, including touch-screen, video, bar coding, sound, and multimedia.

A Natural Migration to Microsoft Windows

After launching the development effort, Dr. Campbell formed Medical Management International to manage development of the software and the VetSmart pet hospitals. Soon after, he enrolled the company in the Microsoft Solution Provider program. Joining Dr. Campbell at MMI was Mark Howard, a FoxPro® database expert and president of Vancouver, Washington-based Software Blueprints, itself a Microsoft Solution Provider since the program was first introduced.

Howard decided to base the VetSmart solution entirely on FoxPro for Windows® and on other Microsoft products for three reasons. The first was the work he had done with FoxPro in general and for Dr. Campbell in particular. Howard had programmed in FoxPro-and before that FoxBASE®-for more than a decade, and he had developed solutions for Dr. Campbell based on FoxPro for MS-DOS®. These solutions came about because of Dr. Campbell's disillusionment with other database products. "In contrast to those products, FoxPro provided the speed and reliability we needed," Howard says. "So when it came time to build this solution, it was natural for Dr. Campbell to migrate into a FoxPro for Windows environment."

The second reason for specifying an all-Microsoft solution was the recent availability of the Microsoft Windows NTTM operating system. Dr. Campbell had used Novell® NetWare® and LANtastic® in his office, but for the VetSmart project both he and Howard realized they needed a more powerful system. "For starters, we wanted the ease of use and administration we knew we would find only in a Windows-based approach," Howard says. "More important, we wanted a system that was designed from the ground up to meet the integration needs of a major client-server solution, and Windows NT met those requirements on the nose."

Support was the third reason. "I had a strong relationship with the Microsoft people, starting with the formation of my business back in 1983," Howard explains. "I was confident in the support they could offer us."

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With the first VetSmart pet hospitals scheduled to open in spring 1994, development proceeded rapidly. To create a solution eventually totaling some half-million lines of code, a team of 20 to 25 developers and testers worked 70-hour weeks. Howard

himself put in that much time and more. "At times the pressure was so intense it felt like an inferno," he says. "When we talked about putting out fires, we felt like we really meant it."

The developers used FoxPro for the majority of their programming and added some code using OLE and the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) libraries in the Visual C++TM development system. Windows NT and Windows® for Workgroups served as the solution's operating systems, and Microsoft Office Professional provided desktop-productivity tools and components of key applications. The developers also incorporated two new Microsoft products into the solution when they became available in early 1994: Remote Mail, for interhospital communication, and the Messaging application programming interface (MAPI), for the electronic-mail interface.

According to Howard, using FoxPro as the primary programming tool was a wise decision-particularly because of its Screen Builder, Program Manager, Report Writer, and Query Builder tools. "Along with FoxPro's English-like language, these tools enabled us to manipulate things very quickly," he points out. FoxPro's approach to events and methods also proved worthwhile. "Although you can define fewer events and methods than you can in C++, for example, in FoxPro they're very generic and extendible, so you can do a lot
with them."

For its part, Visual C++ provided specialized capabilities, including support for an integrated ECG device. Using a DDL created with Visual C++, developers also were able to speed up the refresh of critical screens. In addition, the Microsoft Foundation Classes came in extremely handy. "Since I'm not ordinarily a C++ programmer, I wouldn't have been able to use the language at all without them," Howard reports.

The "Absolute Necessity" of OLE Technology

OLE played a major role as well. "With OLE we were easily able to incorporate the rich feature set and various media options that would be so vital to the success of the solution," Howard says. "OLE helped us build on top of existing applications so we didn't have to develop them from scratch-an absolute necessity, considering our schedule."

Using OLE to export data from Microsoft Excel into Microsoft Graph,

for example, the developers built a sophisticated performance-analysis application. By exporting similar data into Microsoft Word, they constructed a peer-review application, and by trading data between Word and a specialized vertical product, they incorporated powerful quality-control functionality into the solution. Because the Visual Basic® programming system for Applications was not available at the time, the developers implemented these communications through dynamic data exchange (DDE).

With Remote Mail and the Remote Access Services (RAS) available through Windows for Workgroups, the developers were able to build a powerful set of interhospital

communications, not only for e-mail but also for remote administration and daily backups. "Remote Mail in concert with RAS provided exactly what we needed for these tasks: a fast, efficient, and economical way to trade files," Howard says.

MAPI provided its own advantages, including support for a programmatical interface to Microsoft Mail. "This turned out to be a crucial part of the solution's communications set," Howard reports. "Thanks to MAPI, I was able to build it with minimal coding."

From Medical Records to Inventory

In March 1994, developers released the first version of the VetSmart solution and within six weeks installed it in a half-dozen brand-new VetSmart pet hospitals. Today, the solution is running in more than 30 VetSmart pet hospitals in California, Oregon, Washington, and the Chicago area.

Known as PetWareTM, the solution incorporates more than 600 screens addressing a vast array of needs. On the medical side, it streamlines record entry and management, diagnoses and therapeutic protocols, vaccination history and results, prescriptions, and laboratory record-keeping. For pet-hospital management, it helps track team assignments and staff performance. Administratively, it supports revenue accounting, invoicing, and inventory management. And for marketing, it provides educational handouts and videos, which are played for clients in the exam room.

Server workstations run Microsoft Windows NT Server and client workstations run the Windows for Workgroups operating system. A documentation workstation and a helpdesk workstation run Windows NT Workstation. At each pet hospital a FoxPro database of more than 100 MB provides PetWare's main data engine, which is accessed by up to 20 people almost continuously. "There's nothing faster than FoxPro's RushmoreTM technology for lookup, which is mostly what we do," Howard says. "Users consistently report instantaneous data access."

The Remote Access Services, in addition to supporting e-mail, provide remote administration of the pet hospitals' servers and local area networks (operating through NetBEUI protocols) from the MMI office in Portland. Howard is impressed all around. "NetBEUI is transparent, reliable, and flexible, and RAS is fantastic for the complete level of control it gives us," he says. "In particular the Windows NT command prompt gives me much-needed control over such tasks as monitoring error logs and nightly backup, both critical for meeting the stringent redundancy requirements in the veterinary profession."

Providing additional network-administration services is the Windows NT scheduler component, which enables administrators to schedule software installation, backups, file updates, and other tasks remotely. "With the scheduler we save time, money, and headaches by avoiding all

Figure 2

those hours we might otherwise spend on the phone," Howard notes.

Automating Remote Administration

Immediate plans for the PetWare project include upgrading all the developer workstations to Windows NT Workstation. Once that happens, administrators will use the Microsoft Systems Management Server to completely automate remote administration.

In other areas, developers will upgrade the central database engine as soon as FoxPro version 3.0 is available. After that they may replace the corporate data repository, now in a FoxPro database, with Microsoft SQL ServerTM. Making this possible will be the FoxPro 3.0 direct-command capabilities for Microsoft SQL Server, which will enable FoxPro to act as a front end to a SQL Server database.

Toward that end, Howard and his associates have been putting Microsoft SQL Server through some very tough paces to determine its suitability for the corporate data repository. So far, they're pleased with what they've seen. "We believe SQL Server can give us even greater data integrity and more secure transaction rollbacks and central storage," he says. They're considering other advantages as well. As Howard explains, a number of major pet-food and pharmaceutical companies have expressed interest in using VetSmart data for research and new-drug trials. "Since these businesses are SQL-oriented, a Microsoft SQL Server platform could make our data much easier for them to access," he points out.

An Indispensable Role

According to Dr. Campbell, PetWare plays an indispensable role in the VetSmart endeavor. "Without PetWare we wouldn't be able to offer the high-quality, consistent, and cost-effective care that's required for a venture of this scope to succeed," he reports. "We simply couldn't have created this business without it."

In turn, Howard says that he and his fellow developers couldn't have created PetWare without the Microsoft development tools. "On this project, we were working so hard and so fast that we took the system's capacity-and our own-to the absolute limit," he explains. "Without an integrated set of tools like the Microsoft products, it would have been a nightmare."

Further development will be continuing for some time, with current plans calling for pet hospitals in 120 locations by the end of 1997. As Dr. Campbell puts it, "The continuing expansion of VetSmart is likely to make it the most visible veterinary practice in the United States and the one by which people judge the whole profession." In fact, with PetWare

supporting the pet hospitals' operations, he welcomes every bit of increased visibility. "We're adamant about raising standards, doing the best we can by pets and their people, and helping the profession in general," he says. "With PetWare I'm confident we can keep on doing these things."

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Customer Support Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.

© 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, FoxBASE, FoxPro, MS-DOS, Visual Basic, and Windows are registered trademarks and Rushmore, Visual C++, and Windows NT are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. PetWare and VetSmart are trademarks of Medical Management International. PETsMART is a registered trademark of PETsMART Inc. LANtastic is a registered trademark of Artisoft, Inc. NetWare and Novell are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc.

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