Working with Specialty Providers to Increase Rates of Children with Chronic Illness Immunized Annually with Seasonal Influenza Vaccine: Your Help Needed!

The Vermont Child Health Improvement Program (VCHIP) is working with the Children’s Specialty Center (CSC) of the Vermont Children’s Hospital to increase the rates of children vaccinated annually against seasonal influenza in the pediatric nephrology, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes clinics.  As you know, children with chronic illness are at particularly high risk for complications of influenza. VCHIP has obtained UVM Institutional Review Board and HIPAA approval for this quality improvement research project with these clinics.  

 

In this project, we are striving to optimize the medical home as Vermont’s primary immunization delivery resource.  With this in mind, the specialty clinics are:

 

·     educating families to get seasonal influenza vaccine for these children and their close contacts at their respective primary care practices as soon as possible this year

·         providing lists of their patients to primary care practices so these practices can identify and recall children at especially high risk to immunize them early in the season

·     improving flu immunization tracking of children cared for in the CSC clinics

·    providing a safety net for those not immunized in primary care by administering the immunization and notifying the primary care provider

As part of this project, many physician practices, via their vaccine managers, will be receiving a faxed communication and request from VCHIP later this month on behalf of the physician leaders of the above-mentioned CSC clinics.  (Ann Guillot, MD; Tom Lahiri, MD; and Paul [P.J.] Zimakas, MD).  We are making you aware of these faxed communications to enable you, if so desired, to discuss how they should be handled in advance by your practice vaccine manager.

 

The faxes will contain:

 

1.       A list of patients who, according to the records of the three clinics, receive specialty care in the CSC and primary care in your practice.  The list is provided to help facilitate your outreach to immunize these children as soon as possible with 2009-2010 influenza vaccine.

2.       A smaller list with a subset of patients for whom the clinics are requesting your verification of any flu vaccine administered last flu season. The vaccine manager will be asked to fax back dates of any 2008-2009 annual flu vaccine administered to children on the list. This will help the specialty clinics determine the accuracy of parental and self report of influenza immunization. This list is from a 20% random sample of patients from each of the three clinics combined, minus any in the sample for whom the clinics were already able to verify influenza immunization in 2008-2009 that was entered into the Vermont Department of Health Immunization Registry.

 

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Your collaboration and support of this project is paramount to its success. Please contact the Project Director, Kathleen Keating, RN at 802-656-9190 or Kathleen.keating@uvm.edu if you have any questions about this project.