A Commentary on Process Improvements to Reduce Manual Tasks and Paper at Covid-19 Mass Vaccination Points of Dispensing in California.

My Turn is software used to manage several Covid-19 mass vaccination campaigns in California. The objective of this article is to describe the use of My Turn at two points of dispensing in California and comment on process improvements to reduce manual tasks of six identified processes of vaccination-registration, scheduling, administration, documentation, follow-up, and digital vaccine record-and paper. We reviewed publicly available documents of My Turn and patients vaccinated at George R. Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and Oakland Coliseum Community Vaccination Clinic. For publicly available documents of My Turn, we examined videos of My Turn on YouTube, and documentation from EZIZ, the website for the California Vaccines for Children Program. For patients, we examined publicly available vaccination record cards on Instagram and Google. At the George R. Moscone Convention Center, 329,608 vaccines doses were given. At the Oakland Coliseum Community Vaccination Clinic, more than 500,000 vaccine doses were administered. The use of My Turn can be used to reduce manual tasks and paper for mass vaccinating patients against Covid-19.

Immunization calculation engine: An open source immunization evaluation and forecasting system.

INTRODUCTION: The immunization calculation engine (ICE) is a free, open-source immunization forecasting evaluation and software system whose default immunization schedule supports all routine childhood, adolescent, and adult immunizations based on the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). ICE utilizes its immunization rules and patient data to evaluate and return the validity of each immunization in the patient's history along with one or more evaluation reasons. It also returns a recommendation for each vaccine group along with one or more recommendation reasons. METHODS: In January 2020, ICE was first released as a Docker image along with the traditional zip archive file which had been used up to that point. Docker enables software providers to easily distribute their software so that it can be run "out of the box" in the user's local environment. Software running in Docker containers drastically reduces the complexity of software distribution and set up. RESULTS: Clinical systems of many types use ICE. The project began within the public health arena as a feature of Immunization Information Systems (IIS), but electronic health records (EHR) and personal health records (PHR) have also deployed ICE. While it is not possible to identify the specific impact of ICE on clinical care without additional research, it should be pointed out that once deployed within an IIS, EHR, or PHR the display of ICE results is performed for every patient viewed by a user and often for every patient appearing on a report. In a typical month, thousands if not millions of evaluations and forecasts are performed by ICE and displayed to the users. CONCLUSIONS: The ICE Project believes in minimizing the barriers to installing and using ICE anywhere. To that end, there is no registration required to download the source code or runtime code for the ICE service and its default rule. Similarly, the Project created a Docker image of ICE to facilitate easy and seamless implementation.

Clinical Decision Support for Immunizations (CDSi): A Comprehensive, Collaborative Strategy.

This article focuses on the requirements and current developments in clinical decision support technologies for immunizations (CDSi) in both the public health and clinical communities, with an emphasis on shareable solutions. The requirements of the Electronic Health Record Incentive Programs have raised some unique challenges for the clinical community, including vocabulary mapping, update of changing guidelines, single immunization schedule, and scalability. This article discusses new, collaborative approaches whose long-term goal is to make CDSi more sustainable for both the public and private sectors.

Service-oriented architecture in public health.

Public health systems have been developed over many years and are costly to maintain or replace. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have provided a way for these systems to remain viable and responsive to increasing demands for information and analysis. As healthcare entities look for strategies to effectively achieve "meaningful use:" of their EHR systems, SOA will emerge as one key technical strategy for enabling this functionality. This paper offers two case studies of core public health systems in different jurisdictions and the strategies used with SOA to extend system life and to enable new and important features.