Lessons Learned From Conducting Vaccine-Related Research Projects with Adolescents In Clinical Settings

Background: Few multi-faceted studies addressing adolescent vaccination and clinical preventive services currently exist in the literature, leaving researchers with limited models for designing research projects. This session will present successful and unsuccessful data collection methods,  and barriers to identifying gold standards for documentation of  adolescent clinical preventive services counseling.

Setting: Pediatric, Adolescent, and Family Medicine providers at private practices and community health centers in San Diego County, California..

Population: 11-17 year old patients and parents of 11-13 year old patients seen for well-care visits at private practices and community health centers.

Project Description: The project aimed to evaluate the impact of adolescent immunization recommendations on the delivery of other recommended CPS. Similar data were to be collected from multiple sources (patients/parents, medical charts, and providers) via various methods (including in-person, telephone, and web-based interviews and chart abstraction). Data collection instruments were developed to allow for comparing responses. Practices believed to have a medium to high volume of adolescent patients were enrolled.

Results/Lessons Learned: Reviewing billing information while recruiting medical clinics could be more effective than clinic self-report to determine if patient volume will support the demands of a study. Email based surveys yielded low response rates due to parents’ security concerns with their child completing online surveys. In-persons surveys at the medical provider office significantly improved response rates. While the medical record is accepted as the “gold standard” for documenting immunizations, CPS counseling documentation varied markedly across clinics making comparisons and verification of patient report difficult. Including office managers or other key administrative personnel in the initial qualitative interview to address policy and procedure questions, especially in large medical group settings, is necessary.