May 12, 2023

Enterprise Cloud API's and Partnerships

By MWI Animal Health

Our history with building Practice Management Systems (PMS or PIMS) goes back to 1994 when the “Jup Vet” system was launched in the UK. Fast forward 28+ years and a lot has changed in the practice management space.

The original PMS was installed, on-premise at the veterinary practice and typically was confined to a single database. After two versions of “Jup Vet”, the Enterprise product was launched, followed by the Voyager product. Both were on-premise, and desktop based applications, allowing multiple practices to synchronise data for the sharing of patient data, treatment history, diagnostics and follow-up care.

In 2014 we launched the first private cloud hosted practice management system “Merlin” and migrated over to the public cloud Microsoft Azure a few years later. This meant that practice management staff had access to their PMS using a standard web-browser with all data stored securely in the cloud. Fundamentally, they could access data from any standard PC with a web-browser. Whilst this isn’t revolutionary today in other vertical markets, it was within the veterinary industry.

On-premise vs Cloud

80% of PMS/PIMS software in North America are still on-premise and a fair number of practices in the UK and Europe still use desktop based, on-premise solutions.
On-premise solutions have several disadvantages:

You need an IT department or vendor to administer and correct issues on the software, and hardware, running in your practice. That’s costly, cumbersome and time consuming when it comes to resolving operational problems
You have a single point of failure if the hardware fails or there is a network issue
You are prone to operating system viruses and security issues if other people use the system for browsing the web or they use external USB devices or hard-drives
You have to replace costly hardware every few years to run the PMS or PIMS solution

MWI Enterprise Product Suite

MWI has rolled out an enterprise cloud-based solution over the last two years for 1000+ practice sites in the UK, all running on top of the Microsoft Azure platform. That product suite consists of a number of key applications:

Merlin PMS Application – to support operations within your practices
MWI PET –a pet parent solution to practices for appointments and comms
Swift Mobile Treatment Application – a mobile treatment app for mobile vets
Online Store - for Business Practices to order drugs and consumables
Our Enterprise development platform and API to extend Merlin to other areas of your business and integrate with wider applications

MWI Appstore and Integrations

Our platform isn’t a static product like other vendors and we provide fully open API’s to extend the platform to the needs of your business. We also understand we cannot build everything for your veterinary business in one product, so we utilise our Open API to integrate various third-party applications. Today this includes approximately twenty different applications that you can choose from and integrate, including:

• Plexi – a complete referrals solution for your practice;
• Vetstoria, Virtual Recall and Petsapp – communication and engagement tools for your practice;
• Vet Impress – a mobile solution for recording treatment in a farm scenario;
• IDEXX, Antech, Milab, Abaxis - laboratory integrations for your practice.

In addition to this, all of our internal mobile and web application integrate with the same API as our third parties.

Enterprise Veterinary Ecosystem – Leading with API First

An Application Programming Interface (API) sounds very technical, but as a business owner it’s a critical part of extending your PMS and associated applications in your digital journey as a business. You can view the API for below and use this to plan your new application or integrate an existing application.

We utilised exactly the same API for building MWI Swift and MWI Pet, so it’s tried, tested and scales accordingly. If you want to understand how to take first steps then the following guide is a good start:

https://www.mwiah.dev/http-api-docs/first-steps

To view the entire list of API endpoints that are available to you see the following:

https://www.mwiah.dev/http-api-docs/intro

Digital Transformation

This approach of utilising a platform enables you to plan digital transformation of your business with the PMS as the central system of record for your data. You can build a suite of interconnected applications and integrations in a unified ecosystem for the business. For more information on planning a digital transformation see the following article:

https://enterprisersproject.com/what-is-digital-transformation

Partnerships

We’re always on the lookout for applications and integrations to add to the MWI Appstore. If you do have something you would like to propose then get in touch:

professionalservices@mwiah.co.uk