“I’m totally convinced that the record-keeping system will be of great value to fish health in the long term,” says Ellen Marie Kvamme, product manager in the IT department at Lerøy.
The record-keeping system has been named the ‘fish health portal’ (Norw: Fiskehelseportalen) and lays the groundwork for health-promoting work throughout the fish’s life cycle, something that several of those who have started using it have great confidence in.
“The fish health portal lets us map and compare groups more efficiently than we can today. This makes it easier to initiate measures and work more preventively to improve the health of the fish we’re responsible for,” says fish health coordinator Linn-Maren Strandenes.
“The fish health portal will deliver good results because it gives us a lot of information. I think it’ll also be easier for us to articulate our ideas and make recommendations for individual sites and the different Lerøy companies,” says fish health biologist Erik Barman Michelsen.
From supervisory visits at sea or hatcheries, enquiries, advice on fish health issues that need to be documented, autopsies, inspections, treatments, requests, sampling and sample results to registration and diagnosis – everything that fish health workers do in the course of a day must be able to be documented in the fish health portal.
“Quite simply, it’s going to be a full-value work tool for fish health workers,” Ellen Marie explains.
Ellen Marie has neither coding nor developing skills herself, but works closely with developers and designers. As product manager for the fish health portal, she liaises with Pål Skjold, Lerøy’s Fish Health Manager, to ensure that the tool creates value for Lerøy and those who will be using it. This is why three fish health workers representing Lerøy’s farming companies have been involved in developing the portal: Linn-Maren from Lerøy Sjøtroll, Erik from Lerøy Aurora and Marius Hamre, who is fish health coordinator at Lerøy Midt. They meet twice a week to test and evaluate the sketches, so that the system becomes a useful work tool.
“Being involved in steering the design of the fish health portal, both in terms of content and how we present it to fish health workers, has been really fun,” Erik says.
“It’s essential that those of us who actually need the portal have had the chance to help shape its development,” Marius explains.
Fish health workers are further required to keep records in accordance with the provisions covering animal health workers and the health records regulation. Marius explains that getting the fish health portal in place has been necessary to enable those working on fish health to comply with legal requirements. In addition to the involvement of representatives from the farming companies, the fish health portal includes feedback functionality that allows fish health workers to submit suggestions for improvements and notify errors directly to the development team. New functionalities are user-tested on a bigger sample, and all fish health workers are invited to monthly ‘show & tell’ meetings for low-threshold participation and feedback.
The value lies in the database. Because the fish health portal is tailored to fish health workers’ actual requirements, they have access to high-quality data with a level of detail never previously available.
“The potential for a tool of this kind to improve fish health is enormous, but it’s hard to know exactly what we can learn, what we can work out and how fish health can be improved. But stage one necessarily has to be achieving better control of fish health data, and that’s something this customised tool is now providing,” says Ellen Marie.
She explains that there is definitely a lot of learning potential from comparing the data with growth, or studying diagnoses against environmental and sensor data.
“It’s a real treasure trove – we just need to work out how to use it,” she says.
The background to the fish health portal was the desire among the management of Lerøy’s farming companies for a shared record-keeping system in order to standardise and rationalise the way we work on fish health. Linn-Maren says it has made a big difference to her job. Fish health workers have long needed a work tool that can make their everyday working life more flexible, efficient and reliable, and easier to keep track of.
“Going forward, all documentation on healthcare and health monitoring will be registered on a common platform, providing fish health workers with a very good overview of the monitoring that has been carried out previously at all the facilities in each company. In purely practical terms, one of the things this will help with is easing the administrative burden within the Group, because all the necessary documentation is available in one place,” she adds.
Ellen Marie explains that we already have access to a lot of good data from sensors and modern technology, but that fish health requires people with a clinical perspective and professionalism to actually interpret and document the information they obtain.
“The work fish health workers do when they carry out autopsies, take samples and document their activities, combined with personal assessments, is what produces outstanding data.”
She believes the sum of the data from fish health workers, sensors and smart technology can be really valuable.
The fish health portal was launched in November 2023. Until then, the only functions available were recording visits at sea and enquiries.
“These functions alone provided so much value for fish health workers that they chose to start using the portal,” says Ellen Marie.
Since then, new functions have been added for sample results, diagnoses, recording visits to hatcheries, document uploads and routine records. Although the fish health portal is in daily use, it is also still under development. The goal for the team working on the portal is to spend around 20% of the development time on improvements and error corrections and 80% on new developments. Ellen Marie has big dreams for the portal. Little by little, she envisages making it smarter by implementing more integrations.
“We can make it even more efficient for fish health workers’ everyday work. Just imagine being able to communicate with the individual sites, receive notifications to support the decision-making process and perhaps even get camera images from submersible cages. It offers huge potential and many opportunities to grasp,” she enthuses.
The final version of the fish health portal is yet to be seen, and will depend on both the strategy and willingness to invest. However, the vision is for it to be a complete digital system for fish health workers.
