Implementation of standard health data management protocols on dairies

Sarah Kristina Giebel

The primary purpose of this project was to evaluate the impact of standard protocols on dairy health data management and identify risk factors associated with the time to capture and enter data on-farm. Factors associated with the feedback required for dairies to attain and maintain compliance with standard protocols were also identified. Time-budget analysis was used to assess the time taken to capture and enter health data before and after protocol implementation. Data entry error reports were provided as feedback to facilitate protocol compliance. A dairy was considered compliant when ≤ 5% of computer entries were incorrect for two consecutive weeks. A herd was considered to have relapsed if >5% errors were identified on a monthly report following compliance. Standard health data management protocols were implemented on 43 dairies in the Pacific Northwest. Time budget analysis was completed on 23 dairies in Washington State with ≥ 500 cows. Following protocol implementation, more herds took less or the same amount of time for data capture (95.5%) and entry (77.7%) than took longer. Risk factors associated with the time for data capture included personnel involved and capture methods. Of the 43 dairies enrolled, 42 became compliant with their protocol during the study period. It took a median of 4 reports (delivered a median of 8 weeks from enrollment) to attain compliance. There were medians of 16.7%, 6.7% and 4.4% errors on the 1st, 2nd and 4th reports, respectively. The median percent errors stayed below 5% v from the 4th report to the end of the study. Of herds that contributed at least 2 months to the study post-compliance (n = 40), 53% never relapsed. Risk factors associated with relapse to noncompliance included: personnel performing data entry and the use of a standard treatment entry function of the dairy management software pre-enrollment. Implementation of health data management protocols did not add substantial time to the process of health data management. Dairies can implement and maintain consistent health records within a short period of time when provided with standard health data protocols and feedback on data entry.

Implementation of standard health data management protocols on dairies

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details