Summer is just about over and that means a return to school for many children around the nation. Mixed into the stack of papers your child will bring home might possibly be an immunization form from the school health office. Do you remember where you last placed the immunization cards?!? Is it time for a DTP shot? an HBV? a Hep A? If you’ve switched primary physicians, or worse still, states, your current doctor might not have a backup record of the vaccinations. In fact, “One in five U.S. children receives at least one unnecessary dose of vaccine by the age of two, wasting $15 million in vaccine cost each year.”*
To help with this problem, many states have implemented their own electronic immunization repositories (no national database exists.) For example, in Utah, for the past five years or so, every newborn child has been automatically enrolled into USIIS (“Utah Statewide Immunization Information System”, pronounced “you sis.”) Qualified health care providers and educational organizations alike are granted access to the system. Now, after a visit to the doctor, a child’s immunization record is updated in the state database (running Oracle, by the way), which can then be accessed in report form by the school nurse.
Though I applaud the Utah Department of Health for their efforts to gather and store medical information electronically, the USIIS system falls short in a couple of aspects. For one, there is no facility for direct parent access to the system (no “parent portal.”) As well, having a separate database for immunization data apart from the rest of a persons’ medical information seems divergent from the goal of a universal personal health record. Finally, there is no access/permissions model controllable by the parent. Once data is entered into the system, it is viewable and editable by *all* of the users on the system.
On the up side, USIIS does have a web interface and an HL7 interface and USIIS can be configured to work with EHR systems. As well, it has the ability to connect to other states’ immunization record systems (recently it was coupled with Louisiana’s when Hurricane Katrina refugees came here.)
Does your EHR system have the ability to interface to your state’s immunization system?
* Source: National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC)Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
