This presentation will describe the strides made implementing meaningful communication between IIS and EHR-S, based on adoption of HL7, support by a community of practice and leadership from CDC.

A three part panel will explore the success factors for the community-wide effort to connect electronic health record systems (EHR-S) and immunization information systems (IIS).  Stuart Myerburg Moderator 

Part 1: (Rob Savage speaker)

IIS have more than a decade of successful EDI with EHR-S. More than half of IIS report ability to send and receive HL7 immunization messages. Dozens are moving from HL7 V2.3.1 to V 2.5.1. CDC and the public health community saw the importance of connecting EHR-S and IIS in the 1990s. The CDC Immunization information System Support Branch (IISSB) developed and supported a community of practice, the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA). One key focus of this group was interoperability. Together, they developed an HL7 Version 2.3.1 implementation guide supporting messaging. Experience identified weaknesses in the Guide, leading to development of a Version 2.5.1 implementation guide.  CDC used HITECHARRA 317 funding to twenty grantees to encourage EHR-IIS interoperability enhancement and the implementation of the Version 2.5.1 messages. Meaningful Use legislation has encouraged uptake of HL7 messaging by EHR-S.

Part 2 (OSELS - Roochi Sharma) 

This part of the panel will describe a number of tools have been developed to support the efforts described in Part 1. In addition to the Implementation Guide, Messaging Workbench profiles have been created. The PHIN VADS vocabulary service has integrated the value sets.  An interdisciplinary team has selected and documented a preferred transport layer. A Message Quality Framework (MQF), a message testing tool, has been developed by CDC, based on the Implementation Guide profile. These tools will be presented in this section.

Part 3 (Speakers from abstracts submitted)

The final section anticipates sharing of some implementation experiences. We suggest that suitable abstracts be drawn from submissions and included in this panel.