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NewMetrica was established in 2013, building on from more than 25 years research into animal pain assessment by a multidisciplinary team working at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

From an initial focus on acute pain measurement, around fifteen years ago, research into the impact of chronic pain lead to the development of robust instruments designed to measure health – related quality of life (HRQL) in non-verbal species.

Using a foundation of best practice in human healthcare measurement, products such as VetMetrica have been specifically designed to measure how an animal “feels” from its individual perspective. This novel approach supports a significant shift in veterinary care and animal welfare more generally, from the avoidance of poor quality of life to the attainment of good or excellent quality of life.

“I have been using VetMetrica for over 18 months now and have found it has revolutionised how I monitor patients and collect data to assess treatment responses. I have been using regenerative medicine to treat dogs and cats for over five years for a number of degenerative conditions such as osteoarthritis. As this treatment is new, I wanted to monitor responses to treatment to help develop protocols and best practice. I have been able to use some of this data to publish my results to promote awareness and efficacy of this novel treatment option. Initially, I was using owner questionnaires such as the canine brief pain index (CBPI), Liverpool osteoarthritis in dogs (LOAD) and the Helsinki chronic pain index along with measuring quantitative data and veterinary assessments. I soon found that these paper based questionnaires had their limitations. Commonly people were not able to answer all the questions or felt unqualified to do so. Incomplete questionnaires were useless and could not be used and getting owners to complete the forms and return them was a logistical nightmare. This resulted in missed data points and many cases did not continue to fill in the questionnaires after treatment. A lot of my time was spent chasing up these clients. My veterinary assessments and quantitative data were showing massive improvements but in many cases, I did not have sufficient validated owner reported treatment outcomes to compare with my findings. The power of my findings were therefore affected as my trials were not placebo controlled and double blinded, something that is very difficult to achieve in a clinical practice. I tried different questionnaires to see if I could get a better response rate from the owners but all had the same issues.

When I first heard about VetMetrica, I thought it may be the answer to my problems with owner reported outcomes. I found the team at NewMetrica very approachable and encouraging. Professor Jacky Reid gave me lots of advice on how VetMetrica could be set up and used in clinical practice and how its design would assist in complete questionnaires being returned and how the data could be analysed. VetMetrica had many advantages over the other questionnaires that I have used and it had been validated for osteoarthritis in dogs. It was very easy to set up and NewMetrica trained one of my colleagues to use the tools which was intuitive and easy to follow. The online questionnaire was appealing and its design made it impossible to leave a question unanswered so we no longer received partly completed questionnaires. All the data was instantly uploaded to give a health related quality of life score and this was easily graphed to track changes in various domains over time. This gave me great owner reported outcome measures for my data collection at the same time as I was collecting the veterinary assessments and quantitative data. I could view this data during my consultation and discuss with the owner how the dog was getting on in the home environment. Due to the owner email reminders, compliance was greatly improved and the software flagged any questionnaires that were due to be completed but that had not been. We could then chase these up with a quick phone call reminder and in most cases this was sufficient to ensure completion. I now have hundreds of animals enrolled on VetMetrica and this is providing a great window into the animals quality of life and how it feels in its home environment. This has enable me to better care for these patients and also collect good quality validated data for future publications. I cannot recommend VetMetrica enough and it has applications in clinicial practice as well as a research tool. Its real time monitoring allows for early identification of problems leading to quicker intervention and the results can be used to help guide owners decisions and monitor responses to treatment.” – Andy Armitage, Greenside Vet Practice

“I found that a computer based scale run by Newmetrica… the same great people who gave us the Glasgow Pain Scales… is a wonderful way to get reliable quality of life scores.  You can find it here at http://www.newmetrica.com/vetmetrica-hrql/.  It generates a non-biased decision using a computer algorithum.  Answers are weighted differently so it is harder for the caregiver to subconsciously manipulate the outcome.  And they cannot go back and change their answers like they can on paper form”  Dr Mike Petty

“Firstly I want to congratulate you and your team on the important work you are doing in the field of pain assessment and in particular the NewMetrica HRQL tool which I think is a real game changer!” – Leon Warne.

“It goes without saying that within our dealings with the team at NewMetrica we found them to be consistently helpful and professional throughout”.