Kaylee Hillinger

Welcome to the Round Barn. I’m Kaylee. And today we have with us Dr. Marty Mohr. Good to see you Dr. Mohr, thanks for being here.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Yes, you’re welcome. Happy holidays.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yes, happy holidays. It is my last day of working before the holidays and then I’m going to throw in the towel until January and shut this laptop down. How about yourself? Are you working at all?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Well I have a lot of family time. Long weekend. Kids come home and get a little break. But the holidays is actually a good time to reflect on the current year and make goals for the coming year. So it’s always a good time. Everybody should and does deserve a little break here at this time of year, I think.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yes, I do hope you get one, because I also know the life of a swine veterinarian. You probably are thinking, “Oh, it’s a good time to catch up, too.” So.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Yep, we’re good. We’re in a good space and ground right now. So I’ll be alright.

Kaylee Hillinger

Excellent. Well, good to hear. So Dr. Mohr is joining us today and he has just completed his Master of Veterinary Science degree here with us at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. And so one of the classes that they take is VCM 595, which is a capstone project. So really the purpose of that is to integrate what they’ve learned throughout their master’s program, as well as try to get some real life problems, narrow those down to some problem statements, and start tackling discovery and solution options.

Kaylee Hillinger

And so Dr. Mohr had a project that he worked through in facilitation with some of our faculty for the master’s program as well. And we wanted to get him on here to talk about that. So thanks for joining us for that.

Dr. Marty Mohr

You’re welcome.

Kaylee Hillinger

And Dr. Mohr, I just want to first start by asking you a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, and just a little bit about your background.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Good question. Originally from southwest Minnesota, a small town called Springfield, Minnesota, and attended University of Minnesota. I’ll back up- the son of a veterinarian. So my father was a veterinarian, also a graduate of University of Minnesota. So I pursued degrees in animal science and ag economics first and then graduated in the early nineties and pursued swine medicine. Obviously the agriculture industry was in a lot of transition from small, diverse operations to getting more specialized.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And I saw that trend. And also I was interested in all the aspects of swine medicine and so I pursued that. And here we are today. Fast forward many, many years and I have two businesses, one call Mohr Vet and one called Mohr Vet Research. Mohr Vet provides veterinary consulting services to full size operations farrow to finish, to wean to finish, to sow co-ops, to independent farms, etc. And then have another business called Mohr Vet Research, which does contract research. Over the years, whether it’s simple proof of concept products to elaborate products for approval.

Dr. Marty Mohr

So that’s what we do in Minnesota. Yeah, totally enjoy it. And every day is a challenge.

Kaylee Hillinger

I bet it is. It sounds like you stay busy between those two things. Absolutely. So you joined our Masters of Veterinary Science Program… when?

Dr. Marty Mohr

A good question. It was, I want to say pre-pandemic, right before the pandemic started. So late 2019. It was really a program that was an EVP program that’s been hosted by the University of Illinois for a number of years. And then you could use some of those classes, along with some additional classes to pursue the master’s program.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so let’s just say 3 to 4 years we’ve been at this. And so I’m ready to put this to rest and use this knowledge and move on.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yeah, and hang that diploma on the wall for another much earned degree and advancement. So that’s great. Well, so you joined the master’s program from EVP, so you were able to apply some of those credits and then you’ve been kind of on this journey with us to maintain the rest. To continue to build on that transcript in order to go towards the Master’s.

Kaylee Hillinger

And then is it the last two semesters that you’ve been doing your capstone project or how long has that one been?

Dr. Marty Mohr

That sounds about right. It seems like it’s a long year, but yeah, there’s been steps, but there there’s a process to it which makes sense and it’s an educational process. So to help you think and problem solve and that’s really been a value from the program, is you look at things and see things differently.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Plus as a result of some of the tools and some of the classes that have been along the way for problem solving. And that’s what we do every day. And so that’s good.

Kaylee Hillinger

And so what was the problem that you chose to tackle with your capstone?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Sure. The project was supposed to be kind of real world. And in my world, the problem or the challenge or the frustration is managing veterinary diagnostic data, especially from multiple laboratories and different laboratories provide different array of tasks or specialties. And so not all samples from myself or probably other veterinarians go to one laboratory. And so the challenge is how do you manage all that, and what I mean by manage that is physically manage it: from paper to paperless and internally plus also get timely communication, preliminary and final results to the stakeholders. The stakeholders being defined as owners, managers, supervisors potentially feed industry representatives or anybody on the team.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so that’s number one. Number two, I think the vet role in the swine industry and probably other industries, too, is very critical. We’re in a unique position, but we’ve got to be able to figure out what tests are on, what do they mean, what they don’t mean, what samples to collect, so that we we’re making the right decisions every day.

Dr. Marty Mohr

There’s a lot of money spent on diagnostics, samples and testing to get the right answers. And there’s an array of tests and there’s a great array of technology. And a shout out to the diagnostic labs. We couldn’t do it without you, but yeah, but we’ve got to be able to communicate that in a simple format. This high level information in a simple format to the end customer.

Kaylee Hillinger

And see about what matters, right? Because you get diagnostic data that- you know, PRRS positive doesn’t necessarily mean that the barn is on fire and there’s something that needs to be done. It could be unexpected.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And nestled in that is different reporting… codes, let’s just say codes or information from different labs. You know, there’s not big differences, but there’s differences from bacteriology versus molecular diagnostics and what’s important. And so we just got to try to decipher all that and make timely decisions. And that’s a very important role as a veterinarian.

Dr. Marty Mohr

So that’s the problem.

Kaylee Hillinger

The problem statement is, from what I understand then: about the management of diagnostic data and the relay and aggregation of it from system to system and kind of your communication and work with those clients. So what’s your current state that leads to this? Not only a problem that you have but it really is an industry problem and you are certainly not alone.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Well the current state of affairs. It’s easy to do things when you don’t have challenges and troubles. It’s a state of chaos and frustration when you have a lot of diagnostic testing and decision making that needs to be made. And so when you think about it, our samples go. We collected them fine, but we got to get the right samples collected at the farm level.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Get it to a lab. Get some preliminary information. Which is- the labs, all of them are good. They email you updates every day on the progress of these cases. And we may communicate that formally or informally to the stakeholders or the customers along the way. So that’s step on. And then step two is, once all information is final, the state of frustration is, what do we do with all this information?

Dr. Marty Mohr

We can’t manage paper and compile that. And so we can monitor and manage things over time, both in time and space. And so the State of the Union is each lab has probably different platforms and report these results differently and they may have different accounting systems even. And so we just need to come up with standardized data that’s reliable and an IT process and a platform to exchange all this information to our end user and customer.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so, yes, these diagnostics- maybe a simple one case is important. Yes, we got disease X or diagnosis, but there’s value. And different people value this in the enhanced- the visualization of this information on a graph, for example, or the aggregated or the data over time. And so there is value in that. And I think that’s an important role a veterinarian can play in the value to their customers by figuring out how to manage this data.

Kaylee Hillinger

So from my understanding, you did some discovery to kind of validate your opinions on this, and I’m sure you were headed down the right track among some of the others. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Sure. So I may have my idea, but I wanted to test this. Yeah, sometimes you gotta be careful that you don’t listen to yourself and you have some good network of people and bounce ideas off other people. Because you might have the wrong answer, so we did a little survey among peers, variety of physicians. Some were institutional, i.e. diagnostic labs or colleges, some would be veterinarians.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so there’s a survey of veterinarians, but they had different positions throughout the industry, some with pharmaceutical industry, some private practice, or some would be in what I call corporate or integrative practice, and some would be with the labs on the question about how you’re managing data, whether it’s on a case level or an aggregate level, and the perceived ease of managing this data for both of those situations.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so what we found is we had good respondents, good response of all ages, from people that had graduated from vet school from 0 to 10 years, an equal a number that graduated 20 to 30 years. So that was a good demographic response rate and also basically asked a few questions. And I think the punch line is, is one, people do submit samples to multiple labs in or have to manage data from. About three quarters of people are using multiple labs so it’s pretty common. Number two, the responsibility the veterinarian to the customer is real to communicate that. Ironically about two thirds of-

Dr. Marty Mohr

the communication is done by email, but a third is still done by the phone. So that was a little surprise that, hey, pick up the phone and tell people that the answers are. That was a little bit of a surprise. But that isn’t when you really dig into it deeper of the why. And another point would be is most people found navigating on the D lab website to find the answers-

Dr. Marty Mohr

was actually pretty easy. But it became very complicated when you start aggregating all this data and trying to come up with data analysis over time. And so that’s where the frustration came in. So that’s where the frustration came in, similar to me. And one statistic, just basically 41% of respondents strongly agree that they’re easily accessible, but about half agree that we’ve got to come up with a new system.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so there’s a wide range of agreement and disagreement, but yet it showed me that there’s a need.

Kaylee Hillinger

And so we’ve got kind of a broad audience here that listens to our podcast: from very experienced swine veterinarians like yourself to, as we joked about a minute ago, my mother in law who listens, who doesn’t have a lot of pig knowledge. But when you’re talking about aggregating data over time to monitor or measure and the challenge that comes with that, can you just give us one example of where that huge frustration comes for you?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Sure. So one example may be: you may have a sow farm and its health status. Let’s pick something: PRRS negative, PRRS naïve, for a time then goes to a disease outbreak. We will do all these management and veterinary practices to control or hopefully eliminate the disease. But there should be milestones along the way to test and see if you’re on progress.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so you might be testing sows, you might be testing pigs, you might be testing downstream nursery pigs. And there’s different tests. And so you’ve got to compile that to give yourself a report card, for lack of a better term, to see if we’re making progress. And so that’s when we talk about aggregating or getting all this information around. Yep, we know we have disease X, okay, that’s step one.

Dr. Marty Mohr

But then step two is what do we do with all this information to make sure we’re on progress to reach our goal, our health goal? And so does that make sense?

Kaylee Hillinger

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for bringing everybody kind of on the same page there.

Dr. Marty Mohr

That’s a good question.

Kaylee Hillinger

So in your survey results and as you kind of kept thinking through what the problem is and I assume part of your project was to come forward with some possible solution options, is that where you took this project?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Yep. Yep. We did. And the solution, it could be a long hard path to get to the solution. Let me give you a quick current state. I think currently there are veterinarians or veteran clinics or administrative staff trying to create their own database, whether it’s on spreadsheets or database to monitor the data.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And if they have interest in IT and if they have the knowledge, and the staff, and they have the understanding of the terms, the medical terms: people are doing this.

Kaylee Hillinger

You just described a unicorn, by the way.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Yeah.

Kaylee Hillinger

With people with all of those skillsets, the time, the energy.

Dr. Marty Mohr

But on the contrary, there are veterinarians and staff that that don’t, because they don’t have the time or the abilities to manage this information. So that came out of the survey. And so my thought process for one of the solutions may be: can we come up with a platform that would share the information between labs so it’d be standardized reporting? First of all, back up, we should create some standardized reporting.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And that’s going to have to be a meeting among veterans and labs. Okay. That’s maybe step one. Two would be to come up with an IT platform for that information to be communicated between labs. Easier said than done because each lab has their own accounting and their own IT platform. But that could be done, I would say, between a partnership between the labs with some funding of some sort, which is really easy to talk about but hard to get.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And number three would be: I think one possible solution would be some of the- and it would have to be a conversation- is the manufacturers of all these lab kits and equipment. You would think if this equipment is in one laboratory, it’d be the same in another laboratory. There could be some standardization in terms of the reporting.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And so to me, this partnership would be important. It may take private industry, too. And whether it’s in veterinarians investing or private enterprise investing, because at the end of the day, in the survey, customers are willing to pay for some of this information to get it at their fingertips. Right now. We just got to figure out how to get there.

Kaylee Hillinger

And when you say customers, is that customers of the diagnostic lab: being a veterinarian or a producer?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Good question. I would say both, if I surveyed some of my top ten customers and said, “if we can have this at your fingertips, would you be willing to pay a little bit more?” And they’d say, “absolutely.” And so the answer would be yes. Our customers and I would say yes to the veterinarians that have interest in this.

Dr. Marty Mohr

But I think this is not going away and the next generation is going to be more IT savvy. And so I think we just got to get there. Somehow we’ve got to get there.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yeah. As we think about product development, it’s who gets the value? who’s willing to pay? And that’s how you’ve got to keep going down the path of finding out who’s responsible for getting started. So in your eyes, who should be the first person to really- You mentioned a few options, right? But in your head, where does this problem and the responsibility for it lie first?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Well, I’m a more of a private enterprise person than a government person. But I think private enterprise should and could try to get this developed. You’ve got to kind of get the ball rolling someplace, somewhere. And so I think with some potential industry support, maybe through checkoff dollars or through foreign animal disease funding dollars from the government, or customers willing to put some effort and time and money in this. Because there are plenty of IT platforms in our industry today for recordkeeping and for just computerized recordkeeping. It can be done.

Dr. Marty Mohr

You look at Zoom. I mean since pandemic, you know Zoom is number one and it was kind of out of nowhere. So it can be done if there’s a need.

Kaylee Hillinger

And you kind of opened the other can of worms there with foreign animal disease, where this whole concept is not only to the benefit of you and the customer, but if and when that were to happen, that value proposition totally changes and shifts. So who’s going to take proactive ownership of kind of coming up with a solution?

Dr. Marty Mohr

Right? And that’s where I see the state or the government has some value or interest in this because they want to have some sort of system. Let’s talk about foreign animal diseases, to be able to just understand health status in movements. It’s huge and so right now it’d be pretty cumbersome. And so yeah. There’s value to everybody within the industry, all the participants, the potential audience, I would say.

Kaylee Hillinger

And Dr. Mohr, I know a lot of the project was about coming up with the problem statement and paring it down to something manageable because we often all kind of go out in the world and say, “here’s all the things that I want to accomplish”, and it’s really easy to kind of go crazy with it. But this doesn’t even scratch the surface of the value proposition or the problem for a producer.

Kaylee Hillinger

Not only is it integrating diagnostics with their health status, but what does that actually mean for their production and how those things tie together? So yeah, you definitely played your role with paring down the problem to make sure that it’s something that a solution could be broached. But yeah, this one kind of keeps growing and I know-

Dr. Marty Mohr

It just keeps getting bigger.

Kaylee Hillinger

We kind of talked about within the industry. So I just have a couple of finishing questions for you because I’m curious if what you learned, and what you heard from your peers, and through your discovery, if you’ve made any changes or are considering any changes in your own practice around this problem.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Well, good question. I’ve been busy, actually. I thought the project was going to be more related to developing your own and having your own problem fixed. Now, I understand the problem. I got to go, I guess, spend the next year fixing it. But I do have a greater appreciation for where the industry needs to go and what needs to be done.

Dr. Marty Mohr

As you look at all the ins and outs. And hopefully with this podcast, other people can get an appreciation to direct the smart people doing the work every day, working on these things in the right direction. And I think, yeah, that was one thing that came out of it. Number two, I got to figure it out.

Dr. Marty Mohr

I think at the end of the day I’m going to have to make more investment internally because we’re not gonna have a solution tomorrow. But keeping an eye on the future and the ball will help. And I think bottom line is, we got to get off spreadsheets and get into databases. That’s probably the simple thing, because this is a beast.

Dr. Marty Mohr

This is a beast.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yeah. And my concluding question for you, but I think you kind of answered it was: any advice that you would have for your peers as veterinarians or producers in order to kind of help the industry evolve on this problem? But you really just said kind of jump in and-

Dr. Marty Mohr

One is awareness, two is taking the whole foreign animal disease piece seriously and getting your customers prepared and ready, and yourself ready. Hopefully, we don’t have to deal with it, but if we do, there’ll be so much scrambling, there’ll be so much market disruption and so much scrambling going on. It’s not going to be fun.

Dr. Marty Mohr

It’ll be similar to like a COVID experience. In how everything just changed and flipped 180 degrees overnight and you had to figure it out in a hurry. So I think we’ve got to take this serious. We’ve got to take this: what I call “peacetime” period to get prepared. So then when “wartime” hits, you’re ready to execute.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yeah. There’s a little bit of fatigue with the peacetime too.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Yep. You can get complacent.

Kaylee Hillinger

Good to keep us on our toes. Anything else that you want to share about?

Dr. Marty Mohr

No, I think it’s all good. I challenge people to keep learning in whatever ways. It can be formal and informal. I think that’s what’s exciting about education today. When I was in- I’m dating myself- I’m in the Jim Lowe era, I’ll put it that way. And so back in those days-

Kaylee Hillinger

He likes to tell people that he was around when Baby Jesus was.

Dr. Marty Mohr

Yeah. So getting a master’s when we went to veterinary school, the way we did it today would be unheard of. You’d have to go back to the university and sit there and be in the classroom. And so, it’s exciting that you can continue to learn whether it’s through YouTube or through online classes or Zoom. And in some of these nontraditional ways, is kind of refreshing and commit to lifelong learning because there’s just so much.

Dr. Marty Mohr

And I think that’s good for the soul and good for what we’re trying to do every day. So anyway, that’s all. I just want to encourage people to keep doing that because you can learn in many ways. It doesn’t have to be formal. There are many informal ways too.

Kaylee Hillinger

Yeah. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Dr. Mohr, for joining us on The Round Barn. For our listeners, if you want to learn any more about the Master’s of Veterinary Science Degree, the Capstone Project, or students like Dr. Mohr, please visit our website at vetmed.illinois.edu/MVS. And thanks for listening to The Round Barn, we’ll catch you next time.