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Do you know who owns your veterinary practice’s data?

If you assume you know, you could be wrong, and this is something you’ll want to correct right away. If you can’t access your own information, you can’t utilize it to give you beneficial information about your practice performance, opportunities to profit, and more.

Grab your practice management software provider contract or access the terms and conditions and review them carefully. Check availability to access and request your practice data and your back-ups. Not sure how to dig through a legal document or find exactly what you’re looking for? Call your practice management software provider and ask these three important questions:

1. Do I own my veterinary practice’s data?
2. When I request a back-up of my data, how often can it be done and in what format can I receive it? Also, how long will that take?
3. Do you work with a software data conversion or migration company to extract my data in the event that I want to switch providers or have my data accessed by third-party companies?

Your veterinary practice management software provider houses your data, but your practice should own it. All those precious detailed chart entries, client information, images and videos, and inventory records should belong to you. It’s your hard work—you should be able to keep it, transfer it, and use it as you’d like.

Some veterinary practice management software providers actually own your data and can prohibit your practice from accessing it, backing it up, or even transferring it to another software provider. Don’t get caught in this sticky situation.

Veterinary software providers can give your practice a full suite of benefits. But, if you’re interested in working with another party to enhance patient care or develop better strategies for business profits, you’re going to need access to, and ownership of, your data.

If you don’t know who really owns your veterinary practice data, check now. Not owning your data can make it difficult to make changes down the road.

• Keep your data safe (in the cloud is preferable, because it’s safer and more secure than storing your data on a local server)
• Complete nightly back-ups
• Ensure your data is SSL encrypted
• Be able to provide your practice with a FULL back-up within 24 hours
• Give you your data in a format that is transferable and portable

Also, look into any relationships your provider might have with third-party companies that could affect the storage and security of your practice’s data.

YOUR practice data should belong to YOU.