Purpose: By providing a publicly accessible online decision aid for health providers and patients, the work described here both addresses the difficulties health providers face in generating an optimized catch-up immunization schedule and improved active patient risk communication based on a personalized schedule.
Method: Health-care professionals face the challenging task of constructing a catch-up schedule for children under specific rules and guidelines. While there are systems which provide the next set of recommended doses based on these guidelines, we have designed a web-based tool to assist in decision making for the entire immunization regime for pediatric and adolescent populations. The online immunization scheduler is a publicly accessible tool which allows both providers and patients to create dynamic and personalized schedules based on historical immunization information. Users choose a tailored version of the tool which fits the appropriate role: patient or provider. Allowing both roles access to the same information facilitates improved patient-physician communication and active patient engagement and ownership for immunization coverage.
Result: We have tracked basic online usage statistics on the tool since the initial announcement of the tool on a publicly available vaccine information website. At the onslaught of the initial announcement, the overall site saw a usage rate of ~3400 page views per week. Following the announcement, the site experienced an average of ~1500 page views, or 44% of the initial rate. 52% of users have indicated that they are a provider, while 38% have chosen to click to the patient version, 10% of clicks on global information links. Patient users had an initial 687 page views and have average of 500 per week. While Provider users had an initial 1649 views with an average of 700 per week. Patients and providers spent the same number of minutes on their respective pages indicating the same level of in-page use.
Conclusion: The purpose of this project was an immunization decision support tool for health providers, however we are also able to provide access and promote engagement for patients. The results of the usage survey indicate that patients are steady users of the tool. Our hope is the results seen thus far will provide a platform for collaborative dialogue and risk communication between patients and physicians in addition to immunization rule decision support.
See more of: The 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making