VMDB has collected data on animal diseases since 1964 through member hospitals at North American Veterinary Colleges as an initiative of the National Cancer Institute for the purpose of studying cancer in animals. Since then, 26 universities have submitted more than 7 million records to this database. The current database stores abstracts of hospital records that are a compendium of all the cases at the universities, not just the cancer cases. This makes VMDB a valuable resource for researching animal diseases and effectiveness of treatments.
Our servers are located at the University of Missouri, College of Veterinary Medicine. Currently contributing member institutions have unlimited access for searching. Noncontributing member and non-member searches are available for a fee upon written request for specific topics.
This search site offers two distinct databases to search and you may pick either one. The most recent one has coding in the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terminology (SNOMED CT). SNOMED CT has been used to record clinical data since 1996. The database with SNOMED CT records includes approximately 580,000 patients, 1.4 million visits and over 14 million concepts (diagnoses, findingings, procedures). This coding nomenclature is current and revised every six months. In addition, an extension for veterinary terminology is maintained at Virginia Tech.
The other coding scheme used in the other database is known as the Standard Nomenclature of Veterinary Disease and Operations (SNVDO) that is no longer in use. This coding scheme is not maintained. The database contains over 6 million visit abstracts. You can choose which database you would like to search by picking either one. Note that the data from each are NOT mixed and searching is completely independent of the other. Information that can be obtained from searches include institution where the animal was seen, what species and breed the animal is, age, weight, sex, discharge date, patient number assigned, if the visit was a recheck and postal code of the client. Searching can be conducted by diagnosis, etiology, or clinical sign.