Houston Community College/Houston Area Rotary Clubs Immunization Fellowship Project
The Houston area lags behind the country and the state when it comes to a basic health care measure essential for preventing the spread of communicable diseases: standardized childhood immunizations. Crucial for improving and sustaining Houston’s childhood immunization rates is implementation of “reminder/recall” systems. Once established, these systems remind patients about appointments and immunization due dates and allow health care providers to detect patients who have missed appointments and need to be rescheduled. Reminder/recall systems have been shown to be very successful at increasing immunizations, but to be effective they depend on the existence of a complete or “whole” immunization record. A whole record provides for more consistent documentation, better care, and proper immunizations. Immunization registries, or Immunization Information Systems (IIS), have been established to consolidate children’s records. Unfortunately, Houston-area registries suffer from a serious backlog of unentered data, and as long as this backlog persists, our city will struggle to meet its immunization goals, and many Houston children will not receive adequate care.
The HCC/Houston Area Rotary Clubs Immunization Fellowship project will place immunization student fellows— Coleman College Health Information Technology and Medical Assistant students—in clinics and provider offices throughout the Houston area, where they will systemically input immunization records into registries and implement reminder/recall systems for use by office staff going forward.
The immunization student fellows will each work 20 hours per week, 50 weeks of the year, entering backlogged data for participating sites in Houston and Harris County. The Houston Area Immunization Partnership will provide project management, training and support services for the fellow and for the clinic staff.
While the participating sites receive assistance with backlogged records and the implementation of a reminder/recall system, the student fellows receive on-the-job immunization experience, which will help them serve as immunization champions in their future jobs.
All clinics and providers must be authorized Immunization Information System users, exhibit a commitment to immunization best practices, and demonstrate a plan for sustainability of the program. Additionally, the participating sites must be willing to set aside time and workspace to accommodate the needs of the student fellows, provide organized immunization records to be entered, and access to an Immunization Information System.
More information about this project is available from the Houston Area Immunization Partnership.
