Learning Objectives for this Presentation:
By the end of this presentation participants will be able to:
1. Understand how modern business engineering and facilitation techniques can be applied to analysis of immunization information system (IIS) processes and development of best practice recommendations.
2. Describe a vaccination deduplication process, its foundational principles and business rules.
3. Identify the impact of vaccination level deduplication on supporting immunization coverage assessments with good information.


Background:
The Modeling of Immunization Registry Operations Workgroup (MIROW) of the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) was formed to develop a topic-by-topic “Best Practice” guidebook for various aspects of IIS functionality. Vaccine level deduplication was the second topic developed by this group.

Objectives:
Provide guidelines to encourage common practices for conducting vaccination level deduplication in IIS, thus improving quality, consistency, and usefulness of registry information.

Methods:
19 subject matter experts representing insight from various aspects of IIS participated in a two and a half days facilitated meeting, followed by many post-meeting teleconferences to analyze existing practices and formulate consensus-based recommendations. The workgroup utilized modern business engineering and facilitation techniques

Results:
• Defined vaccination level deduplication as a three-phase process consisting of Selection, Evaluation, and Resolution phases.
• Developed principles, defined business rules, and documented specific scenarios that illustrate their application to vaccine deduplication.
• Formulated a concept that each vaccination event should be presented in the IIS by two record views – the “best” record selected from vaccination reports and the consolidated record that aggregates information from all available sources.


Conclusions:
The methods used and results developed from this workgroup are relevant for developing and documenting best practices and operational requirements for domain-specific deduplication applications in public health, healthcare, and other areas. This use of business modeling techniques enabled development of common approaches and consensus for IIS to support immunization program activities with better information