Challenge: Vaccinate thousands of county residents as soon as possible
With only 34 personnel, the county’s health department faced a huge task at the end of 2020: fulfilling its responsibility to its 54,000 residents to administer COVID shots county-wide and quickly build community immunity.
In addition to organizing mass vaccinations events and delivering each injection, these 34 workers needed to manage all the logistics and tasks around patient throughput and documentation:
· Scheduling thousands of vaccinations
· Confirming and reminding patients of their appointments
· Notifying Jessamine personnel of new appointments
· Balancing available inventory on a daily basis with number of appointments
· Collecting patient information to satisfy CDC requirements
· Reporting to immunization registries
· Scheduling second vaccine doses
· Billing responsible parties
The county’s health director, Randy Gooch, realized these demands would quickly outstrip his team’s capacity. He sought support from ezEMRx, implementing its EHR and its Mass Vaccination Scheduler module.
Solution: To address the health department’s demands, ezEMRx combined the centralized data management made possible by the EHR with online scheduling enabled by the stand-alone scheduler module. This combination enables staff to enter data one time and it’s automatically distributed where needed. As each staff member accesses a record, it’s updated in real time, so all staff members (with permission) have access to the most up-to-date info automatically.
The process is initiated when patients register for vaccination appointments on the Jessamine County Health Department’s website. They immediately receive email or text with confirmation and a QR code.
When a patient arrives on the day of the event, he or she is instantly checked in by staff using the registration QR code. Each staff member interfacing with a patient is provided with an iPad, included with the system, that keeps all data current in real time – and can be easily carried where needed throughout the facility.
Staff enter vaccine inventory information, administer the shot, and the data automatically updates immunization registries in real time. The system then prompts the nurse to schedule the second dose with the patient, where needed.
Results: Randy Gooch reports that by simplifying operations in this way, his team was able to schedule more than 7,700 appointments and complete more than 7,000 vaccinations in under 90 days.
“The reduction of duplicated effort has provided a much greater level of efficiency and effectiveness for us to maximize the efforts of our small team,” he said, adding that an additional benefit is the ability to “provide a more user-friendly experience for the community we serve.”
In the stressful environment of COVID-19, It’s also allowed him to improve working conditions for his employees, he said. “Our team has been so thankful for the CDP ezEMRx vaccination solution. We were able to implement it very quickly, even in the midst of our mass vaccination response to COVID-19. The support we’ve received from the CDP exEMRx team before and after implementation has been second to none and confirms daily the good decision we made in we made in implementing the product.”