6.2: Notify Patients of Immunization Status

Overview of Scenario

The EHR or other clinical software system notifies patients based on specific known immunization data.

Example of Scenario

Dr. Smith needs to notify a significant number of her patients about new information and actions they may need to take.  Two examples of such notification include: (1) that a patient received a vaccine that has been recalled and there is a specific action that needs to be taken (e.g., receive another vaccine, etc.), and (2) that a patient is overdue for required vaccines and needs to schedule appointments to catch up with their vaccine schedules.

Guidance

Many products evaluated support notifying all patients identified in a population-level report (cohort) of actions they should take. These vendors support capturing a patient’s preferred method for communication as part of the demographics (expected for Meaningful Use 2014 certification). The products subsequently use these notification preferences to allow providers to notify patients in a cohort of required information. Three-quarters of the products allow such notification; many require the provider to configure the process to support immunization-related notices.

  • Vendor Perspectives. Vendors should work with customers to determine preferences for individual and cohort-based patient notification (i.e., send notification to all patients identified in the population-level report).
  • Provider and Implementer Perspectives. Discuss preferences for the individual patient and cohort notification with the software vendor.

Tests

There are no tests for this capability.

Data Elements

There are no data elements for this capability.