Veterinary informatics: creating the future between veterinary medicine, human medicine and public health initiatives

Objectives: This article reviews the current state of veterinary electronic health records and the ability to collect and analyze large data sets from multiple organizations and clinics. We also review analytical techniques as well as research efforts in veterinary informatics with a focus on applications related to human and animal medicine.Methods and Results: This paper briefly covers various methods of veterinary informatics, including natural language processing and machine learning techniques, and various ongoing projects. After detailing techniques and data sources, we describe some of the challenges and opportunities in veterinary informatics, as well as an overview of common One Health techniques and specific applications affecting humans and animals.Discussion: Current limitations in the field of veterinary informatics include limited sources of training data for developing machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, data scattered between academic institutions, corporate institutions and many small private practices, and inconsistent data formats that make many integration problems difficult. Despite these limitations, there has been significant progress in the field in the last few years and the continued development of a small number of key and large data sources available to interested clinicians and researchers. These real-world use cases and applications demonstrate current and significant future potential as veterinary informatics grows in importance. Veterinary informatics can create new possibilities within veterinary medicine and between veterinary medicine, human medicine and One Health initiatives.

Keywords:

informatics , one health , veterinary medicine , medicine