VeNom Coding Group

A group of veterinary academics and practitioners from across Britain who have devised a standardized terminology for use in veterinary medicine.

VeNom Codes Membership

The VeNom Codes have been developed in the first opinion and referral hospitals at the RVC in collaboration with Glasgow Vet School and the PDSA and are now maintained by a multi-institution group of veterinary clinicians and IT specialists from the RVC, Glasgow Vet School and the PDSA called the VeNom Coding Group.

The members of the group are expanding and this page will be updated regularly. If you would like to implement the VeNom codes please contact David Brodbelt[1] for further information.

VeNom Codes

The VENOM codes comprise an extensive, standardised list of terms for recording the best available diagnosis at the end of a small animal visit. It comprises mainly diagnoses but also includes terms appropriate for administrative transactions (e.g. non prescription diet sales, over the counter items, travel related items) and preventive health visits (vaccination(s), routine parasite control, neutering). In the event that the clinician seeing the animal feels unable to record a diagnosis for the visit (for example, on a first consultation when only limited diagnostic workup has been possible, e.g. coughing where a precise diagnosis is not yet available) it is also possible to select one or more presenting complaint related items (again, these are standardised in the list). In the event that an item is missing from the list, end-users can contact the VENOM Coding group to request the new term. The group would then consider the term and decide to include it or not depending on the agreed terminology.

The codes are a long list identified by their unique numeric codes (Data dictionary id) and work well with a multi-letter search function – so clinicians type ‘abs’ and get all possible terms with abs as first letters of any of the words in the diagnosis – e.g. ‘anal sac abscess’, ‘abscess – neck (cervical)’,…etc. For some terms there are synonyms in brackets behind the main term to allow identification of the correct term if these letters are typed in the search box. Apart from the Term name and data dictionary id (numeric code), there is a label field to identify the type of term and then currently the other fields of the codes include a 'CRIS active flag' which is elected if you want the referral version – presenting complaints without 'presenting complaint' prefix and without the admin tasks etc. Otherwise for the first opinion version the ‘Rx Active flag’ field allows selection of this version. The final field is the Active flag which indicates if the term is active or has been inactivated.