Indian Health Service
Open Source immunization evaluation and forecasting
Indian Health Service
BACKGROUND
Stranded without a replacement
The Indian Health Service (IHS), provides health services to American Indians and Alaska Natives. It uses an in-house developed electronic health record (EHR) called the Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) as its primary clinical care system.
For several years IHS had used an open source immunization evaluation and forecasting system to provide clinical decision support (CDS) services to its clinical staff to ensure that children and adults were up to date in their immunizations. While this product was developed under the auspices of a major academic medical center, it was not widely used and eventually no longer supported. With limited budget and time, IHS needed to find a replacement CDS system that could be easily integrated into its custom EHR.
APPROACH
A trusted open source solution
IHS was able to download, evaluate, integrate, and test HLN’s open source Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) software within a very short period of time and determine that it was not only a good fit functionally but well supported in the community. Nearly a half dozen public health immunization information systems (IIS) currently are integrating ICE, as well as commercial and open source EHR and personal health record (PHR) systems.
As an open source solution, IHS was not required to pay any licensing fee to HLN nor to execute a support contract. IHS did require a new feature for ICE – the ability to manually set the status of a historical immunization – and HLN provided this feature at a small cost while subsequently integrating it into the base product for any site to use.
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