SAIC and SeaWorld Team on Development of the Electronic Animal Records System

SeaWorld, a world-renowned marine animal theme park, had a significant issue with its animal records. It documents perhaps tens of thousands of transactions relating to animal care and management in its parks each year.

SeaWorld's Brad Andrews is in charge of all of its animal operations. In conversation with Tom Otten, SAIC manager and zoologist, Andrews mentioned that SeaWorld was looking for an electronic records management system. However, all of the quotes they'd gotten from developers had been exorbitant.

Otten knew that SAIC has been in the electronic medical records business since at least the 1980s and thought that the kind of systems SAIC had developed might be adaptable for use with animals. "I think SAIC does something like that," Otten recalled telling Andrews.

Otten had been looking for an opportunity like this. It was, he said, the reason that he'd left the zoo world to come to work for SAIC. "You think of all the technical expertise that SAIC has — the zoo community has never really had access to a company with technological capabilities like those of SAIC," he said. "And that is kind of how the whole thing got started."

Lots of Data, No Way to Manage It

SeaWorld, as is the case with other zoological institutions, keeps a wide variety of records on the animals in its care. According to Joan Huelsebusch, SAIC's manager for the EARS program, those include registration and family history, medical records and diagnostic test results, training and behavior records, husbandry notes, feeding records, and morphometric records — or the record of physical changes of the animals over time.

Before EARS, the vast majority of those, she said, were paper-based. Others were in spreadsheets. Others were in different database formats, including Microsoft Access® and the Animal Records Keeping System (ARKS) and its medical counterpart, MedARKS. Still others were in homegrown formats. ISIS, the International Species Information System, which produced ARKS, is described as "the global database for the zoological community."

With SAIC's breadth of expertise in electronic records systems and data management, and SeaWorld's knowledge of the types of records it needed to keep and its expertise with animals, the two companies worked together to create a system that could bring all that data together. "They would help to design it and test it, and then we might find it would be marketable to other zoological facilities," Otten said.

With the tool now ready for prime time, SeaWorld, Otten said, is "excited about it and really excited to help us market it." They understand, he added, that if more organizations adopt the system, there will be more enhancements and improvements that SeaWorld will benefit from.

Geared Toward Marine Mammal Facilities — For Now

A good, comprehensive animal records system is crucial for zoological organizations, Otten said. That's especially so in three major role-based areas — animal "inventory" (animal registrar), animal medical records (veterinarian), and animal health monitoring (keeper/trainer).

While there are some similarities between human electronic health records and electronic animal records, there are significant differences. Partly that's because the animals are in captivity, which necessitates data not just about health. Indeed, zoological facilities often keep animals that are members of endangered species, so it becomes extremely important to keep accurate breeding information.

The system is geared toward marine mammal facilities for now because it was SeaWorld that first expressed interest in it and helped develop the system, said Shane Sullivan, the principle developer. But the web-based system is designed for use with any collection of animals.

Nothing Out There Like It

"We did our user acceptance testing in the SeaWorld environment," Sullivan said. "We put it in their quality assurance environment, and their users reached out, touched it, tested it, told us what was wrong with it, and we made fixes. So we try to use a collaborative approach where we solicited their input along the path. Additionally, we've reached out to other users and potential users to talk about what potential applications we're going to be putting into it next — modules, functionality, things like that."

"There is not anything quite like EARS," Sullivan continued. "ISIS is working on replacing the ARKS system with a product called ZIMS," or the Zoological Information Management System. Sullivan added that EARS is intended to be "a tool for managing the animals in a park" and has been designed to work with ZIMS when it becomes available.

Otten said he'd love to see SAIC's vast expertise put to use in zoological parks in other ways. "The people that really, really care about these animals are always struggling with how to make captive animals' lives better. With all of the things that SAIC has done in technology, the potential for behavioral enrichment," he said, "could be really interesting."