Behavioural alerts to reduce safety risks at veterinary clinics

As a UX designer at Covetrus, I worked on customer-led improvements to Ascend, its cloud-based veterinary clinical system.

Customers requested pop-up alerts for pets with behavioural risks because crucial information was missing. Stories shared by the product team highlighted the stakes: some clinics treated pets with known behavioural risks in the carpark to avoid incidents with pets and owners in the clinic.

Problem

Behavioural information could be missed during booking or buried within a long pet profile.

A label such as 'Nervous' signalled a concern but lacked details about specific triggers. During consultations, vets had to exit their workflow to find this information.

I interviewed two vets across different clinic types and asked about how they captured behavioural notes:

• A franchise clinic using the legacy system: frequent pop-ups meant that they were routinely dismissed.

• An Ascend clinic: behavioural labels were insufficient; incidents still occurred when staff missed the underlying details.

These interviews shifted my focus towards making behavioural details visible at key moments in the workflow.

Solution

I designed a responsive, reusable header component that surfaced behavioural details within scheduling and consultation views.

I tested it remotely with existing customers before development, checking whether they could find the information without leaving their workflow.

Impact

All test participants found the information they needed within their workflow. This supported the design's usability; its effect on safety incidents and retention was not measured.

After release, I would track the effectiveness of this solution by comparing behaviour-related safety complaints against a baseline, accounting for the number of consultations involving flagged pets and changes in behavioural notes usage by clinic over two years.