Increasing Vaccination Rates of Children up to 24 months old at PMG Milwaukie Family Medicine

Increasing Vaccination Rates of children up to 24 months old at PMG Milwaukie Family Medicine Authors: Justin Ferley DO; Rachel Jackson MD; Aubrey Miller MD; Sebastian Reeve MD; Christelle Serra Van-Brunt DO; Jamie Skreen DO; Jeffrey Sun DO; John Yates MD; Daniel Ruegg MD Introduction: Each year in the US, 42000 adults and 300 children die of vaccine preventable diseases. Yet across the country, clinics – including ours – fall short of the CDC Healthy People 2020 goals of pediatric vaccination rates. This resident-led quality improvement (QI) project aimed to improve our clinic vaccination rates in the under 24mo population. Methods: We identified 3 opportunities for vaccinating children under our clinic current processes: well child visits, medical assistants’ vaccinations visits, and acute care visits. Using a multidisciplinary approach comprising residents, MAs, clinical care coordinators and our nursing quality supervisor, we analyzed our current vaccinations processes and our iterative plan-do-study- cycles (PDSA) included: PDSA #1: standardize our work flow for vaccine reconciliation. PDSA #2: sending personal reminder lebers to patients and overall improving our vaccine recall/ reminder system. PDSA #3: Minimizing provider variation for vaccines given at the 12-18mo WCC. Results: We saw an improvement in our vaccinations rates after personalized reminder letters were sent out, outlining that we do not have a reliable vaccine schedule reminder system. We also noted that different providers created different vaccinations schedules in order to prevent giving 5 vaccines at the same $me – with no system in place to follow on missed vaccination, thus creating missed opportunities and suggesting that we need to implement a clinic-wide vaccine schedule. Conclusion: Our last PDSA cycle was interrupted by current CIVD-19 pandemic. We have however found valuable data to help improve our clinic’s vaccination rates, and plan to continue this project over the next 2 years.https://digitalcommons.providence.org/milwaukie_family/1007/thumbnail.jp