STRIKING Gold! Making An IIS the “Nugget” for School Districts

Background: Most schools choose to have ‘read only’ access to an immunization information system (IIS) because they enter data into their own student management software and need a signed parental consent to share the record. We will describe our experience with a large school district that stopped entering their students’ immunization records into their school software system and now use the IIS for their record keeping.

Setting: San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) has been using a curriculum software system to keep track of their student’s immunizations. Their use of the San Diego Regional Immunization Registry (SDIR) primarily had been to look up and print the California school immunization report (CSIR).  Since SDIR is more user-friendly and has other information required for state reporting, SDUSD began to pilot use of only SDIR.

Population: SDUSD is the second largest school district in California, with 155,000 students.

Project Description: A small number of SDUSD school district nurses had been using SDIR to enter a limited amount of administered vaccines. The remainder of school nurses and school health staff used the SDIR to locate immunization records. No effort was being given to update SDIR with immunizations in the school health record. However, SDUSD health district staff was motivated to start using the SDIR exclusively due to its user-friendly data entry and additional school reporting features. A pilot project was initiated with preschool and kindergarten registrations in which parents were informed of the school district move to the registry and the appropriate consent forms obtained.

Results/Lessons Learned: Since May of 2009, over 5500 new immunization records and 55,000 shots from SDUSD students have been added to SDIR.  The acceptance by SDUSD parents has been positive and future efforts will expand to the grade’s one through twelve.