The HLN Consulting team attended the AIRA 2022 National Virtual Meeting held on April 26-27, 2022. Over 650 individuals attended the virtual meeting – AIRA’s largest meeting to date. Throughout the two-day event, AIRA provided interesting speakers and engaging panels on a variety of topics related to Immunization Information Systems (IIS) and public health informatics.
Noam Arzt and Mike Berry from HLN presented two breakout sessions at the conference.
- TEFCA is Finally Here: What This Might Mean for Public Health and IIS: The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) finally released version 1 of the Trusted Exchange Framework, Common Agreement and the QHIN (Qualified Health Information Network) Technical Framework (QTF). This talk explained the basics of the TEFCA standards and approach, and help IIS projects prepare for its arrival. The TEFCA FHIR Roadmap will be introduced and explained, as well as key decision points for IIS over the next few years.
- Immunization Evaluation and Forecasting During COVID-19: Vaccination has been a major component of the pandemic response since the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use in December 2020. Clinical decision support – determining the validity of doses administered and recommending future doses — has played an important role in the immunization campaign. This talk discussed the updates to the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) throughout the course of the pandemic to support the evolution of the evolving set of authorized vaccines and changing eligibility for additional and booster doses. Several aspects of the COVID-19 vaccines and their clinical guidelines led to novel challenges for immunization evaluation and forecasting that were adapted in ICE.