Abstract
We describe the Murcia regional vaccination register in Spain, which was set up in 1991, detailing its main features, advantages and limitations. We also report on some recent special actions carried out that led to an improvement in vaccination coverage against measles, rubella and mumps (MMR): by using the vaccination register, we were able to identify and vaccinate persons aged under 20 years in a measles outbreak in 2010 in the town of Jumilla who were not adequately vaccinated for their age with MMR vaccine. From spring 2012, use of our register will enable us to identify susceptible individuals in our region under 40 years of age who have received fewer than two doses of MMR vaccine and call them for the appropriate vaccination. We also set out our experience in the use of barcodes to identify individuals and collect vaccine data: our data show that the barcodes help to improve data quality and completeness. Finally, we identify certain challenges in search of greater standardisation for systems and encoding that is necessary to enable an easy exchange of data between different registers.
Highlights
Vaccine information systems or registers are a major tool that allows public health personnel to measure, maintain and increase vaccine coverage levels and to gather information automatically about an individual’s vaccine needs
They can help to improve data quality and monitor the implementation of new vaccination recommendations [3]. They enable the registration of side effects and the monitoring of vaccine effectiveness. All these advantages have been demonstrated in countries with extensive experience of computerised vaccination registers such as Australia [4] and the United Kingdom [5]
Having people’s mobile telephone numbers allowed short message service (SMS) text messages to be sent to teenage girls who had not completed the vaccination regime against human papilloma virus, increasing coverage by 5.1% in the cohort of girls born in 1994 [7]
Summary
Vaccine information systems or registers are a major tool that allows public health personnel to measure, maintain and increase vaccine coverage levels and to gather information automatically about an individual’s vaccine needs. When a child is born in hospital, the public health information system assigns them a personal regional identification code (a barcode), which is given to the parents on labels This is part of the documentation parents receive after childbirth, which includes notification cards that they take with them to accredited vaccination centres, be they public or private. If a person (child or adult) comes to live in the region, when they visit a primary healthcare centre, a form containing their details (identification card) is sent to the vaccination register These details are added to the PER_SAN database manually. In order to promote the supply of such barcoded labels by manufacturers, a technical criterion for their design is included in the competitive tender procedure used for the acquisition of vaccines Reading such labels with a barcode scanner means that only the administration date, the dose order number and the vaccination centre need to be recorded manually. In order to assess the advantage afforded by recording doses using a barcode scanner, we analysed the details of doses recorded in the primary healthcare system for vaccines supplied with
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