Live Oak asked Nonesuch to develop Heel!, an app that would help both veterinary practices and patients.

Pet owners add their pets to their profile. From the practice portal, veterinary staff enter notes about the animal’s condition, medication, and instructions for care.

The app we created provides quick-reference care instructions, convenient refill reminders, and alerts when it’s time to give Fido his medicine.

“As we built out the architecture for the app, we learned there are different ways a doctor might describe dosing,” Nonesuch founder Rob Lingle said. “They might say ‘twice a day,’ or they might say ‘every 12 hours.’ There are also various acronyms the staff might use that have to be translated for pet parents.”

Nonesuch designed a language processing engine to parse text entered by veterinary staff into clear instructions for end users. We made the app self testing so we could add functionality without the risk of breaking what we’d already built.

We taught Heel! all the ways staff might describe a dosing schedule so customers get directions they can easily understand. Nonesuch ran hundreds of tests to make sure the app we developed parses text correctly.

Human language is complicated. There are lots of ways to say the same thing: like “1 pill 2x daily,” “2 pills a day,” or “1 pill morning and night.” If the app misinterpreted an instruction, it could tell a user to give their pet too much or too little medication.

After making sure the app performed the way it should, we looked at ways to make it even easier to use.

We made it compatible with more than 20 top veterinary practice management software systems. Staff using those systems can enter notes into a patient chart in the PMS and the app updates in real time.

We also made it possible for a pet’s entire care team to access its records. When a specialist like Live Oak makes changes to an animal’s care plan, other providers like the animal’s general veterinarian can see the updates in the app.