Oregon's ALERT Immunization Information System: Striving to Meet the Needs of School Law

Background:
The State of Oregon enforces very strong school immunization laws that require significant oversight from schools, children's facilities and local health departments. However, Oregon maintains a well-populated Immunization Information System (IIS), and all sectors benefit from collaboration between partner agencies in enforcing school law. Schools and children's facilities have view-only access to the IIS, and these settings alone conduct over 12,000 successful searches for immunization records each month.
Oregon also has a state-specific Certificate of Immunization Status (CIS) form for children's facilities and schools to use to comply with Oregon's immunization school law requirements.

Setting:
Schools and certified childcare facilities are charged with maintaining immunization records for all individuals age 0-21 years who are enrolled in their program; they coordinate with local health departments to implement school law as well as, when needed, the school exclusion process.

Population:
There are approximately 1758 schools and 1504 preschools, headstarts,and certified childcare facilities across the state that can access the ALERT IIS to meet school law requirements; nearly all actively use the ALERT website.

Project Description:
In 2008, Oregon rolled out functionality on the ALERT IIS to print the CIS form directly from the IIS, autofilling it with data from the child's immunization record. In addition, Oregon updated and released hard-copy transparent overlays, classified by age, to use in evaluating the completeness of records. During the 2008-2009 school exclusion cycle, schools and children's facilities will be able to print CIS forms online, while using templates to evaluate the forms. An evaluation of user access and satisfaction with the printable CIS and transparency templates throughout this school year is planned for Spring 2009.

Results/Lessons Learned:
As of November, 2008, an average of 300 CIS forms are downloaded daily from the ALERT secure web site. Evaluation results will document both trends in usage and satisfaction with the CIS form and templates.