Is it time to change quarterbacks for your football team? This comes up throughout the fall as people question if it was just one bad game, or if something changed, making the quarterback less effective.

While sports pundits have plenty of opinions, many coaches will base their decisions on objective measures of performance, such as quarterback rating, interceptions and more.

Evaluating outcomes and making decisions based on data can help teams get the most value from their selection. The same is true when evaluating the disease treatment plan for your herd.

An effective cattle disease treatment plan is best devised working directly with your veterinarian [see previous “Health & Husbandry” columns on veterinary-client-patient relationships (VCPRs) and treatment protocols for more details]. Creating a disease treatment plan takes time, but the challenging part is implementation, evaluation and continual improvement of the plan.

Implementing a therapeutic plan

Disease treatment plans are specific to individual operations, cattle and disease types. A case definition should be generated with each plan, including a repeatable set of criteria for the animal to be considered for treatment for a specific disease. The treatment plan may have therapeutic options based on severity of disease. However, one of the key components is to treat the animals in the same manner each time to allow outcome evaluation.

Health outcome evaluation is predicated by recording key information at the time of treatment (animal treated, diagnosis, product and dose administered). This information can be collected using a variety of methods — paper, electronic, or even on the calf tag. For records to be valuable, they must be tracked in a way to evaluate important health outcomes.

Health program evaluation

Following a disease event, animals typically fall into one of three broad categories: complete or near-complete recovery, chronic disease, or succumbing to disease (mortality).

A few metrics are commonly used to track not only treatment success, but also provide insight into disease identification. One variable is first-treatment success, which is the percentage of animals that were treated once and never had to be retreated, were not culled, and did not die.

Expectations for first-treatment success vary based on the disease treated. For diseases such as bovine respiratory disease (BRD), expectations for first-treatment success are often around 70%-80%. The reason is that the antimicrobial treatments for BRD are not always enough to stimulate recovery in all animals.

If the first-treatment success is higher than expected (e.g., for BRD a first-treatment success of 95% would be higher than expected), the initial diagnosis may not be accurate. In other words, if our first-treatment success is higher than expected, we may be misdiagnosing another syndrome as BRD.

If the first-treatment success is lower than expected, we still want to evaluate our diagnosis, as identifying diseased cattle late in the process can lead to poor treatment response. Or it could be that the treatment is not as effective, and visiting your veterinarian to determine the next steps is an appropriate response.

Another measure of health outcomes is the case fatality risk, which is calculated as the number of cattle that die following an initial disease treatment. In some operations the chronically diseased animals that are culled or removed from the herd may be included in a similar calculation to give the full indication of these treatment failures. Like first-treatment success, a certain number of failures is expected, and the level of case fatality that occurs will vary by disease.

Interpretation of case fatality is very similar to first-treatment success in that this outcome can be influenced by diagnostic accuracy at the time of treatment.

Disease treatment protocols are a work in progress and open to changes, but making changes based on objective health outcome data promotes productive modifications to the therapeutic plan.

Continual improvement

Disease treatment plans are dynamic and will need to be adjusted based on the disease challenges, cattle type and treatment outcomes. Changing the drugs used to treat a disease too frequently or applying treatments without a specific case definition can increase the challenges in objectively evaluating health outcomes to determine treatment efficacy.

Case identification and disease diagnosis are important criteria to ensure the correct treatments are administered to the appropriate animals. Health outcomes can then help guide changes to the disease treatment protocol to improve health outcomes.

Conclusions

Disease treatment protocols are a work in progress and open to changes, but making changes based on objective health outcome data promotes productive modifications to the therapeutic plan.

Creating a specific health protocol, including relevant health outcomes to evaluate for your operation, can be a valuable tool to optimize the use of treatments for diseased cattle.

Evaluating the objective outcomes can be valuable to continually improve the health responses and maximize your return on investment. Work with your veterinarian to be sure your treatment protocols match the disease challenges of your operation.

Editor’s note: Author Brad White is on faculty at Kansas State University College of Veterinary medicine and serves as director of the Beef Cattle Institute. To learn more on this and other beef herd health topics, tune in to the weekly Beef Cattle Institute Cattle Chat and Bovine Science with BCI podcasts available on iTunes, GooglePlay or directly from www.ksubci.org.