Observations Illustrating the Use of Health Informatics to Link Public Health Immunization Registries and Pharmacies to Increase Adult Immunization Rates and Improve Population Health Outcomes

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act encourages health information exchange between clinical care and public health through Meaningful Use measures. Meaningful Use specifically identifies objectives to support a number of public health programs including immunizations, cancer registries, syndromic surveillance, and disease case reports. The objective is to improve public and population health. Stage 2 of Meaningful Use focused on compliance to sending of information to public health. The next phase focuses on bi-directional information exchange to support immunization intelligence and to empower providers, pharmacists, and the consumer. The HITECH Act Stage 2 initiative provided incentive and motivation for healthcare providers to encourage their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) vendors to implement data exchanges with public health, with the expected result being timely awareness of health risks. The empowerment nugget in the HITECH Act is not in the compliance reporting to public health. The nugget is the ability for a provider to receive relevant information on the patient or consumer currently in front of them or to those they will connect to through their outreach efforts. The ability for public health to retain current immunization records of individuals from a variety of providers supports their program goals to increase immunization rates and mitigate the risk of vaccine-preventable disease (VPD). The ability for providers to receive at the point of service more complete immunization histories integrated with decision support enhances their delivery of care, thereby reducing the risk of VPD to their patients. Indirectly payers benefit through healthcare cost savings and when the focus is expanded from a health model to a business model, there are significant return on investment (ROI) opportunities that exponentially increase the value of a bi-directional immunization data exchange. This paper will provide descriptions of case examples to demonstrate the value of electronic data exchanges when pharmacy immunization providers and public health work together.