The HLN team was excited to attend the AIRA 2024 National Meeting in Orlando, FL. As always, we anticipated that the conference would be well organized and focused on key topics and trends within the immunization community, and of course the AIRA conference planning team did not disappoint! An added bonus was the opportunity to reconnect with colleagues in person and make some new connections with over 600+ attendees.
As Zach Betz, an HLN senior developer explains, though we all (really) appreciate HLN being a virtual company, seeing HLN teammates in person is always a welcome experience. With 25 of our team in attendance, we took full advantage of the Conference events from the opening plenary to the various sessions, gameshow and AIRA reception, as well as all the city of Orlando had to offer. It is a small world after all…at least within our IIS community!
Our HLN team appreciated hearing what other jurisdictions and organizations are currently working on. Multiple jurisdictions discussed the topic of “denominator inflation” and ways of mitigating it that was extremely interesting to Gita Prabhakar, a senior business analyst on the HLN NYC Citywide Immunization Registry (CIR) team. It spurred Gita’s thinking on ways other HLN clients could combat this issue as well. Gita was not alone in her exploration of interesting topics. Nick MacDonald, a business analyst on the HLN Immunization Gateway team, considered Michigan’s presentation on patient deduplication and cleansing tools to be quite informative, so much so that he shared his thoughts with others who could not make the session.
The HLN booth hosted several conversations pertaining to our open source forecaster, the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) which is currently being used in eleven (11) EHR/PHR vendor products, four (4) EHR implementations, and eight (8) IIS implementations that we know about. We also heard from many jurisdictions, considering a transition to a new IIS platform or those interested in assessing, operationalizing or optimizing their current or new IIS. Given HLN’s involvement over the years with the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) Transition Learning Community (TLC), as well as our vast expertise in Agile system development, project management and change management, HLN’s IIS support and guidance are invaluable resources.
The HLN team also presented several topics that proved timely and relevant to many attendees. Topics related to provider dashboards, use of FHIR for bulk queries and interoperability created quite a buzz at this year’s National Meeting. On a personal note, I was deeply honored to receive the AIRA 2024 Recognition Award for my efforts and impact in ensuring the health of our communities. It helps to have the support of HLN and collaboration within our IIS community, after all, it is a small world!
The list and hyperlinks to HLN’s presentations are provided below.
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- Development of a Provider Facing HL7 Dashboard in New York City
- IIS on FHIR: A New Era of IIS Interoperability
- IIS Interoperability Roundup
- Online Enrollment in CDC’s Bridge Access Program for COVID-19 Vaccines in New York City
- Sharing Immunization Data with Bulk FHIR Query: Approaches and Challenges
The AIRA 2024 National Meeting agenda and materials can be referenced on the AIRA website.