Award Winners Share Best Practices

Try These Techniques to Boost Adolescent Immunizations

August 03, 2018, 04:20 pm Paula Haas – If you want to improve adolescent immunization rates in your clinic and your community, eight family medicine residencies across the United States have some best practices to share with you.

"We discovered that many patients with misconceptions about the influenza and HPV vaccines would direct their questions to clinical support staff, their first point of contact at the clinic, and would not receive consistent responses," said Jacqueline Huynh, M.D., resident co-lead on the immunization project at the University of Arizona Alvernon Family Medicine Residency in Tucson.

A good first step is training for everyone. "We drilled down to each and every individual to explain why these immunizations are very important," said Nicole McGuire, D.H.Sc., education coordinator for Union Hospital Family Medicine Residency in Terre Haute, Ind. "We discovered that our residents were unaware of the cancer aspect of HPV, including throat cancer in males."

"It shocked me that some providers could list the tetanus shot but couldn't remember the other recommended vaccines," said Huynh. "This pointed out the need to get back to basics in our training."

Jordan Roberts, M.D., lead resident on the immunization project at St. Mark's Family Medicine Residency in Salt Lake City, told AAFP News that an HPV vaccine training session even sparked an about-face by a faculty attending physician who had been hesitant to immunize his teenagers.

During that session, a survivor of HPV-related cancer said she wished she'd been born in the HPV vaccine era, said Roberts. "Promiscuity didn't cause her cancer; her partner cheated. The attending physician realized that you could raise your kids 100 percent right, and it still might happen to them."

Support staff also should participate in goal-setting, said Adam Rensch, M.D., resident lead on the immunization project at Lincoln Family Medicine Residency Program in Nebraska. "Then the project feels more personal, not just a mandate and one more thing to get done."

Another tip from Rensch: Identify a team member who is passionate about quality management and can serve as the vaccine champion. This takes some workload off the physicians, he said.

Strongly Recommend All Vaccines, Including HPV

When discussing the vaccines, Roberts recommends sandwiching HPV between Tdap and meningococcal so there's no difference in the strength of recommendation for each of them. "The strong recommendation is the only thing we did differently regarding the physician-patient dynamic, and our immunization rates for HPV and the flu just soared."

In the pre-clinic huddle, each resident and nurse team reviews the reports to see which vaccines are due. If a patient is willing to be vaccinated and has no questions for the clinician, the nurse can order and administer them during triage time.

The standing orders also make nurse-only visits for vaccines possible -- especially important for the HPV vaccine, since three doses may be needed, Britt said. After the new protocol was implemented, front desk staff wrote and called all unvaccinated or undervaccinated patients to schedule nurse visits to catch up.

Reach Out to Patients

At St. Vincent's Family Medicine Residency Program in Jacksonville, Fla., staff used the electronic medical record (EMR) system to generate letters, texts, patient portal messages and phone calls to patients needing vaccinations. "Getting people into the office is your first battle, and this was an effective and easy way to reach hundreds of people," said Lauren Woodard, D.O., resident lead on the residency's project.

Good timing increases the effectiveness of outreach materials, the Lincoln residency's Rensch noted. Schedule immunization campaigns for late summer and early fall, when adolescents come in for school and sports physicals, or a few weeks before the holiday season or spring break so patients can have appointments without missing school.

Try New Technologies

As part of its immunization project, the Duke Family Medicine Residency Program in Durham, N.C., used geographic information system mapping to learn more about the clinic's adolescent population.

"Folks in our department helped us map where our adolescents actually live, and we figured out their schools," said Alexa Namba, D.O., M.P.H., resident lead on the project. Armed with this information, residents staffed an immunization information booth at area health fairs.

"We had wonderful discussions with whole families," said Namba. "When we talked about the HPV vaccine, we spoke about how the virus has no symptoms, is very common and can lead to cervical cancer. One middle school girl remarked, 'You mean this shot will keep me from getting cancer? Who wouldn't want that?' It was a moment I wish we could have shared with all our adolescent patients and families."

The Duke residency also started distributing iPads loaded with information about adolescent immunizations for patients to watch while waiting for the doctor.

The University of Arizona project introduced tablets for the same purpose. The tablets show short videos the residency produced to answer questions about adolescent immunizations, said Huynh. The residency won the 2018 Big Shot for Arizona Award from the Arizona Partnership for Immunization for its work on improving vaccination rates.

Understand EMR Capabilities

Namba suggested investigating your facility's EMR to better understand what it can do. "If you're part of an institution with an IT specialist, don't be afraid to reach out about the EMR's full capabilities," she said. "If capabilities you want aren't available, it may only take an ask from a provider to motivate the institution to expand or modify the EMR."

If the EMR can run quality reports by provider, run adolescent immunization reports regularly, Rensch advised. "Having a list of their patients who are behind on immunizations helps each provider realize that even patients with frequent appointments may be behind on vaccinations." The reports ideally should show appointments already scheduled that could be used for catching up.

Standardizing how vaccination data are entered into the EMR is crucial. At the beginning of the immunization project at St. Vincent's residency, individual chart review -- which took weeks -- was necessary to get accurate baseline data, said Woodard. "Our EMR seemed to miss patients if the order was placed in a different way or if the immunization was not done at our office and had not yet been recorded."

She said her residency developed new EMR templates for adolescent annual wellness visits. "Having set encounter plans that include recommendation reminders and immunization order sets seemed to be an easy way to ensure that these things are discussed and ordered properly," she said.

Although several residents acknowledged that poor communication between a residency's EMR and the state's immunization database can be frustrating, Roberts at the St. Mark's residency seized an opportunity to improve that situation by asking staff at the Utah Statewide Immunization Information System (USIIS) to help establish a bi-directional interface between USIIS and the clinic's EMR. Now, when a patient comes into the clinic for any encounter, the state database is automatically queried and updates the clinic's EMR. If a needed vaccine is provided, the EMR automatically sends that information to the state database.

This homegrown bi-directional interface came about thanks to the clinic's medical director, who was a computer programmer before going into medicine, Roberts explained. "He got together with a person from the state database and a third party who helped with the interface, and they hashed it out in an hour-long phone call," he said. "The programming was done the next week. Surprisingly, with the right people, it was relatively easy. It was rocky the first day we tested it, but on day two it started working seamlessly."

The Utah Department of Health honored Roberts with its 2018 Silver Syringe Award for "Physician Champion" for his work on the immunization project.

Leverage Community Outreach

A few of the residencies included community outreach in their immunization projects.

"We developed partnerships with six local groups and piggybacked onto community events with our immunization booths," said the Union Hospital residency's McGuire. "They never hesitated to partner with us."

The residency used photos of kids vaccinated at the clinic on posters to promote free community flu shot events. One poster displayed photos of kids across the top and residents across the bottom, all in the same superhero pose with bandages above their flexed biceps. "We took that poster to community events, normalizing the shots and making it appear that these kids got the shots and they weren't scared, so you can do it, too," said McGuire. "People stopped by our booth and laughed. Doctors as superheroes really resonated with them."

Sometimes community outreach required flexibility on the part of the residency. "We wanted to make vaccination presentations in high school health and physical education classes, but we had difficulty scheduling them," said Natalie Britt of the Savannah program. "So, we got creative.

"We already were in the schools as sports medicine providers, so we decided to insert a 'vaccine minute' into sports physicals and injury clinics. We asked each athlete if they had gotten all of their vaccines and if they knew which vaccines they should get. We encouraged them to talk to their parents. Doing this, we educated more than 1,000 students about vaccinations."

Since many patients at the University of Minnesota Family Medicine Residency in Minneapolis are of Somali descent, that residency focused its immunization project on learning more about vaccination barriers in this group, reaching out to area community centers for help. The focus groups the residency conducted with young Somalis yielded some surprising results (see sidebar).