Oral

Immunization information systems (IIS) are confidential, computerized systems that collect and consolidate vaccination data from health-care providers and have a variety of useful capabilities such as assessing vaccination coverage levels and generating reminder and recall notifications. This session will provide perspectives from the CDC and from state IIS sentinel sites on the challenges of data sharing across programmatic, geographic, and population borders and will investigate the impact of this data sharing on calculating immunization coverage rates. The process of consolidating immunization information into one record is lengthy, labor intensive, and poses several assessment and epidemiologic challenges. Mobile populations who live in one state but receive medical services in another or who reside in multiple states over the course of the year complicate vaccination calculation methods. Public health agencies and programs that serve targeted populations may not easily or frequently share immunization information with other health agencies/programs, which also complicates vaccination coverage assessment and disease surveillance activities. After years of building population-based jurisdictional IIS, the challenge now is to expand them further to cover all children in the region, regardless of borders. These challenges and the impact on immunization coverage rates will explored from the federal and state perspectives in the presentations offered in this session.

Session Objectives: 1) Discuss the diversity of data sharing opportunities available to IIS and the challenges presented in data sharing with diverse systems 2) Discuss the benefits of data sharing to improving accuracy of vaccination coverage assessments 3) Describe the steps for initiating data sharing across geographic, population, and programmatic borders 4) Illustrate how IIS data sharing can increase vaccination coverage levels

CE Credits: CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing