Creation and Use of Test Cases for Influenza Vaccine Schedule and Next-Due Recommendation Algorithm in IIS

Learning Objectives for this Presentation:
By the end of the presentation participants will be able to better understand why tests cases were useful and therefore used in understanding the complexity of the Influenza schedule and how they were used during the development and testing of the new schedule in CCAIR (Contra Costa Automated Immunization Registry).

Background:
Providers looked up the next-due recommendations on CCAIR (Contra Costa Automated Immunization Registry) during patient clinic visits. A lower than expected Influenza immunization rate in past seasons was perceived to be partly due to the lack of next-due recommendations.

Objectives:
Create, maintain and apply a set of test cases during development and testing in order to achieve high quality and to communicate to others the various behavior of the current system design and implementation.

Methods:
Obtain permutations of many factors including patient age, dates of vaccinations, number of Influenza shots within one single season, number of shots in prior seasons, intervals between shots, whether current date is in or out of a season, live virus vaccine being used or not, and many more. Match the outputs of the new algorithm against the anticipated results.

Results:
Over 100 distinct test cases were obtained and used. The new algorithm to support Influenza in CCAIR successfully passed all such tests.

Conclusions:
With good tests cases that are comprehensive, exhaustive and easy to understand, confidence could be built that our implementation of Influenza schedule was done with high quality. It also saved development time.