Home Forums Discussions General Discussion State Vaccine Registries

To pediatric board readers,

So how do you send vaccines to your state registries? In Texas, it's required for any doctor that administers vaccines to offer all patients the option to have the vaccine info sent to the state registry, ImmTrac. Ninety-nine percent of our patients elect to share their vaccines with the state.

All we can do right now is manually enter vaccines we give into the ImmTrac website. They want not only the vaccine but also the lot #, exp date, manufacturer and a bunch of info on the patient. Obviously this takes up a lot of our MA's time.

Only the RI, FL and WA state registries have interfaces with AC. I called AC to ask about TX but they have no date set. What do you in your state? Do you manually send vaccine info the state?

I'm a Family Physician in Maine. We manually input immunization info into our state registry called IMMPACT2. Same experience as you, lot#'s, etc. Yes a hassle but we record it only here in IMMPACT...not in AC. However we record adult immunizations in AC.

While there is no interface between AC and State of Maine, we still uploaded our adult immunization data to the Maine IMMPACT2 program. For the Meaningful Use measure on immunizations, we used the export feature in AC to create a .txt file containing our immunization database information, which is in HL7 format.

The State of Maine gave us an access code to their webportal in which we copied and pasted the export .txt file from AC. It was quite simple. However I asked AC Guardian Support to walk me through. They have a woman at AC Guardian Support whose job is to answer MU questions. I forget her name but she was extremely helpful. If you asked for the MU support person at AC, they will know who you are asking for.

If you are going to attempt to satisfy the Meaningful Use measures, I would strongly recommend consulting with her if you need to produce the export file to meet MU measures. Furthermore, I would strongly suggest talking to your State Immunization people to find out how to upload immunization database information to their webportal (if they have one that will accept HL7 format, by the way this is the most common format for data exchange). Even if you are not going to attempt attestation for MU, you may still find it useful to learn how to export the data for uploading to your state registry. Good luck!

I got AC to help me export the HL7 file. Now waiting to hear back from ImmTrac whether they will take it.. Thanks for your help.

That is super! please update us later if/when Texas helps you upload the info. We would love to hear the result!

So is it safe to say that we can take an exclusion in Texas for the immunization requirement in meaningless use since it is not really set up yet?
Donald Phillips MD Cedar Hill, TX

I don't know much about MU, but when I contacted ImmTrac, they said we can "attest" for the immunization registry if you have an ImmTrac user name and password. You just have to copy and paste some lines of exported vaccine information from your EMR into their attestation online form. I guess ImmTrac won't really accept that info as real but it's just a way for you to attest (?). I'm still waiting to hear back whether they can actually accept the HL7 info I exported from AC.

Our state immunization registry did the exact same thing with us. Our state could only accept certain versions of HL7. For those EMR's they couldn't support, they wrote a letter of exclusion. For those they could support (including AC), we exported the data from AC into .txt file, then copy and pasted into their website after they gave us a username/pass to access their website.
Good luck, sounds like you are on the right track.

Update: Unfortunately, the Texas registry had too many issues with the HL7 file exported from AC. They have a bunch of requirements for the format of the file that they gave me to give to AC. I guess I'll just have to wait until AC updates their programming.

thank you for the update.
Texas should at least give you a written letter indicating they cannot accept the format produced by AC, you should request this letter from Texas if they did not offer it to you. This will serve as verification that you attempted and your state registry is not equipped to handle electronic immunization registry. This should allow you to claim exemption to the immunization requirement when attesting to MU (assuming you are going to attempt attestation).