Farmscape for March 23, 2022

The Swine Health Information Center is looking to expand the network of U.S. diagnostic labs that contribute diagnostic test results for its monthly domestic swine disease monitoring and surveillance reports.
The effort to standardise the manner in which veterinary diagnostic laboratories in the U.S. report their test results to allow for easier comparison began in 2016.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg explains, while those labs may very well do the same tests, results had often been reported in different ways.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
Currently we have five different laboratories that contribute to the system, Iowa State University, University of Minnesota, South Dakota State University, Kansas State University and we've just added, within the last few months, the Ohio State University laboratory.
We put together their diagnostic test information monthly.
The folks at Iowa State University are the ones that are compiling this information and doing the reports.
That gives us and opportunity to do some digging and data mining of the results and see if we can uncover things that will help the pork producers.
The latest effort is to see if we can expand that system even further.
Those five universities use either their own IT systems or they may use a laboratory information system that is commercially available that helps them manage their test results.
Our effort here is to see if we can go with a commercially available data system that helps report those results and standardise it among even more of the laboratories and try to get broader coverage of our results through adding even more diagnostic labs.

Dr. Sundberg says this effort is an example of the willingness of these diagnostic laboratories to collaborate and share their information to help make things in the pork industry better.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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