Technology Strategies for a State Immunization Information System

Abstract

The New Jersey Comprehensive Immunization Program (NJ-CIP) is a collaborative project of The Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. It is an All Kids Count (AKC) project, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to develop a pilot State Immunization Information System (SUS) in Camden, New Jersey, and plan for the expansion of the system throughout New Jersey. NJ-CIP initially sought technical expertise from university settings to promote a research-based selection of the technical components of the software and network. A technical team was created to focus on future needs, using prototyping for the application and selecting the best emerging technology, instead of relying only on what was commercially available at the start of the project. The technical team has positioned the project to pursue a variety of deployment options, funding sources, and partnerships with major hospital/provider organizations to move from a pilot to the NJ SIIS, and to qualify New Jersey as an Information Network for Public Health Officials (INPHO) state, through the following key technical directions: (1) establishing open systems technical architecture, including use of the Internet as the wide-area network connecting sites; (2) developing a standards-based application software using the National Vaccine Advisory Council minimum data set, and providing interfaces to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)/Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Electronic Birth Record, and Clinical Assessment Statistical Application (CASA), including a Health Level 7 (HL7) interface for data exchange; (3) piloting a variety of reproducible deployment models from the Camden sites, all supporting both on-line use and electronic interfaces to local data systems.