Adult immunizations effectively reduce morbidity, mortality, and transmission rates of multiple diseases; however, outpatient providers often a struggle to convince patients to accept vaccinations. This project’s aim is to address vaccination rates in our adult population, focusing first on the influenza vaccine in year one (2016), and then on pneumococcal vaccine in year two (2017), by 1) using a strong quality improvement strategy (known as a Champion Team) and 2) implementing a clinic program consisting of provider training, improved documentation, and informative posters targeted at patients. A quality improvement strategy known as a “Champion Team” provided a strong mechanism through which we developed and implemented the interventions across both years. Specifically, the Champion Team consisted of key stakeholders (nurses, residents, physician faculty, and informatics expert) who identified, developed, and evaluated the program. Programming included an annual health care professional training session for each vaccine (early fall of 2016 and 2017 for flu, spring 2017 for pneumococcal), improved documentation strategies and nursing uptake, and informative posters in the clinic. We assayed data from our patient electronic health record to evaluate: the percentage of our patient population for whom an immunization was documented relative to the number of unique patients seen in our clinic during that time frame. This approach in year one showed a marked increase in influenza vaccination rates in our clinic. During the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 flu seasons our clinic vaccination rates were 39.98% and 42.05% respectively. After implementation of our champion team and clinic wide program to increase rates in 2016 our vaccination rates for the 2016/2017 flu seasons was 50.88%. Pneumonia data for a full year are under analyses and will be included in this presentation. We anticipate a similar increase in rates for our pneumococcal vaccinations. Our Champion Team and clinic wide program were perceived as relatively low-effort interventions yet appeared to increase vaccinations over the course of this study. The replication of these findings across pneumonia data (pending) and, in future work, with the herpes zoster vaccine (planned for Year 3), will increase our confidence that increases in rates were attributable to these very accessible interventions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-1064 |
| Date | 05 April 2018 |
| Creators | Patel, Amit, Veerman, Richard, Polaha, Jodi, Johnson, Leigh, Flack, Gina, Goodman, Michelle, McAllister, Leona, Briggs, Monaco |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum |
Page generated in 0.003 seconds