North Dakota’s reportable disease surveillance system, Maven, has been used to collect case data for epidemiological investigations and disease control for reportable conditions since 2010. The North Dakota Immunization Information System (NDIIS) was established in 1988 and consolidates immunization data for all North Dakota residents. North Dakota has a mandatory reporting requirement for all vaccines administered to anyone 18 years of age and younger. Previously, vaccine information on vaccine preventable diseases or other diseases that required vaccine history follow-up had to be manually searched for in the NDIIS and, if available, had to be manually entered into Maven. Maven and the NDIIS became interoperable in December 2015, greatly reducing the need for time-consuming vaccine searching and data entry.
METHODS:
Consilience Software, the vendor for Maven, developed a trigger that sends an HL7 query message to the NDIIS. The NDIIS sends an HL7 response message back to Maven that includes the patient demographics and vaccination history. The information is displayed to Maven users with either ’0 Results’ if no person matches are found, or ‘1 Result’ and full name, birthdate, gender, address and vaccination history if a direct person match is found. Vaccination history displayed in Maven is filtered based on CVX codes, so only vaccines specific to those that pertain to the disease investigation are entered in the question package. Following the connection to the NDIIS, vaccination history manually entered was compared to that received from the NDIIS query for historical pertussis cases.
RESULTS:
From 2013 to 2015, 179 confirmed and probable cases of pertussis were investigated by the North Dakota Department of Health. The NDIIS query found matches for 148 (82%) of these cases. Of the 148 matches, 111 (75%) had a history of pertussis vaccination. Eight cases had results from the NDIIS query that differed from those that were manually entered. One case had data from another state that was manually entered and not available in NDIIS, one case had an incorrect date dose in the manually-entered data, two had no doses entered manually but had results in the query, and four cases had a missed dose in the manually-entered data compared to that of the query.
CONCLUSIONS:
Interoperability between Maven and NDIIS improves data quality by reducing human data entry error and can update Maven demographic and contact data with NDIIS data, and it reduces time spent on gathering and manually entering immunization data.