Enhancing State and Local Immunization Surveillance by Partnering with Payors: An Example From Oregon and the Oregon Health Plan

Background: Payors commonly measure their population’s immunization rates as proxies for access to quality childhood health care.  Data partnering with a statewide immunization information system (IIS) gives payors access to more  data, allowing increased accuracy in measuring immunization levels. The IIS benefits from such a partnership by gaining access to a broader spectrum of health care encounter data for evaluating  immunization barriers in more detail, such as missed shots and missed opportunities.  For the past two years, Oregon’s ALERT IIS has partnered with the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid and SCHIP) to produce immunization rates and evaluate barriers to immunization for two year olds in Oregon.

Setting: Immunization data from the Oregon ALERT IIS and encounter data from the Oregon Health Plan (OHP).

Population: Oregon two year old children with some period of enrollment in OHP and immunization records captured into the ALERT IIS.

Project Description: OHP enrollment and encounter data were combined with ALERT IIS data as part of the yearly population-based rates assessment in Oregon. From this merged data, both annual rates by county and special research topics as needed by either OHP or the Oregon Immunization Program (OIP).

Results/Lessons Learned: Lessons from the combined dataset have assisted OHP in setting immunization and business practice policy. Finding that short enrollment lengths were highly related to low immunization levels helped OHP set policy to increase childhood enrollment lengths. Incorporating encounter data into immunization assessments at milestone ages has also provide OIP with new perspectives on addressing missed visits and missed opportunities.