BACKGROUND:
The California Vaccines for Children (VFC) program visits private providers and public clinics to evaluate compliance with VFC program requirements and immunization practice according to recommended standards. Chart review and an office quality assurance review are performed with the goal of providing recommendations to improve practice and ultimately increase immunization coverage. California performs hybrid lot quality assurance (LQA) rather than CASA evaluations on most practices.

OBJECTIVE:
Analyze data from VFC QAR visits to develop goals and objectives for VFC office evaluations.
Develop methods to evaluate provider practice improvement, in addition to up-to-date immunization coverage.

METHOD:
All data from QAR is entered into an Access database containing approximately 135 fields in 2002. Data from these visits is analyzed using SPSS to provide summary measures as well as to compare practice deficiencies over time for private offices with more than one routine visit. For some measures, VACMAN data is combined with QAR data.

RESULT:
In 2002, California’s VFC program distributed vaccine to more than 3,154 private medical provider sites—as well as 197 local health department clinics and 214 Community Health Centers. VFC office evaluators visited 1249 private practice offices. Over the past 3 years, 296 offices had prior visits for comparison of results.

CONCLUSION:
Analysis of VFC office visits provides:
-A profile of VFC providers and their immunization practices;
-Opportunities and challenges to optimize the impact of VFC office evaluations;
-Another potential objective measure of practice improvement.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
1.Explore information obtained from VFC office evaluation data.
2.Consider additional means of evaluating office practice improvement.
3.Apply VFC data to assist in program evaluation.