5. Reporting data to your state’s Immunization Information System (IIS)
The CDC is requiring that vaccination administration data are reported to your respective State’s IIS no later than 72 hours after administration.
Here are some potential ways to report vaccinations to your IIS
- Integrate your patient registration tool directly with your State’s IIS.
- Integrate your patient registration tool and your EMR: Your EMR likely already integrates with your IIS, so you could integrate your patient registration tool and your EMR; then, the EMR likely will be able to automatically report patient information to your IIS.
- Perform a CSV data export: A CSV export from your patient registration tool can be imported either directly to your IIS or to your EMR integrated with your IIS.
- Scan using an OCR tool (with caveats): If you collect patient information via pen and paper, you could use an OCR tool (optical character recognition) to scan in this information, and then ingest this into your IIS. The OCR process is error-prone, so you’ll need to have someone quality check the work. We do not recommend this route.
- Manually enter information: The fallback solution is to manually enter information into your IIS. This is time consuming and error-prone, so we do not recommend this route.
Note: The CDC has indicated that vaccinations need to be reported to the CDC’s Data Clearinghouse (DCH). This will likely be done via the IIS at the state level, so this doesn’t seem like something local governments need to worry about. Check with your State public health agency to understand this workflow.