Implementation of an Inpatient Covid-19 Vaccination Program

Abstract

Summary A multidisciplinary team at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) was convened to design, implement, and troubleshoot a program to deliver Covid-19 vaccines to hospital inpatients. The program had several key features, including integration with the electronic health record, flexibility in vaccine distribution models, rapid response to changing eligibility, addressing of federal and state mandates, and continuous communication with frontline staff. The team encountered challenges in implementing the vaccination program, including difficulty defining the population of eligible patients in the setting of a decreasing eligibility pool, management of the logistics of a vaccine with limited shelf life and the timing of inpatient orders, patient and clinician hesitancy, and competing priorities for inpatient teams. On the basis of the challenges encountered, as well as the availability of vaccines from state supply, NYP switched from offering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, given during the initial inpatient vaccination efforts, to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in August 2021.