Zero in on your herd’s health with HealthVAL

Prevention is paramount when it comes to herd health. However, external factors like environment, genetics or nutrition can disrupt even the best herd health programs. Intervention is second to prevention. Quick and calculated management changes can pay dividends when things start trending unfavorably.

HealthVAL, a new INSIGHT for DairyComp and MyDC on PULSE users, combines the power of prevention and intervention. It equips you with the information you need to make the best health-related management decisions and alerts you when health events start trending below your threshold.

Assess the herd

Gain a snapshot of your herd’s health events – from youngstock to cows. Dive into what’s happening by analyzing case counts and occurrences for standard health events like mastitis, ketosis, metritis and pneumonia and track your defined events as well. HealthVAL allows you to completely customize how you view events and filter results based on what you’re interested in. For example, you can customize your view based on month, fresh date or lactation.

You can also set a threshold tolerance for each event based on your management goals. When occurrences trend near your threshold, you’ll receive real-time text or email alerts, making it easy to intervene and adjust protocols.

Benchmark your success

Understanding industry averages for disease occurrence is only one piece of the puzzle. Seasonality and region-specific factors can impact what happens on your farm and alter your expectations for herd performance. HealthVAL incorporates these factors using dynamic benchmarking to compare your performance to your choice of peers using DairyComp. You can select how you want to be compared – by state, breed and herd size.

Compare your herd’s historical performance with peer performance to set realistic goals and respond to changes with updated protocols and strategic management.

Evaluate animal health and costs

Identifying trends within the herd helps steer management decisions for the entire farm. However, profitability of each individual animal needs to be taken into account, too. Now you can dig deeper into outliers to zero in on problem animals. With HealthVAL, each animal is assigned a Health Index value based on age and the total cost of their events. You can set your own cost for health events or use the estimates provided based on industry standards.

Customize the Health Index threshold based on your management goals to identify the animals that do not meet your expectations. Using the index will help you understand which animals pose the highest risk to your bottom line and select candidates to leave the herd.

Stay in control with HealthVAL

VAS is committed to delivering tools that put you in control of how you manage your herd. Insights like HealthVAL allow you to implement protocol and management changes to prevent costly health events or intervene before the problem progresses. Customization delivers the ability to leverage the tool based on your goals and needs to improve herd productivity, health and ultimately, your dairy’s bottom line.

Ready to use HealthVAL? If you’re a VAS customer, HealthVAL is already included in your subscription, at no additional cost. Contact your local farm performance consultant or VAS support to get your farm set up on PULSE Platform to start leveraging HealthVAL.