Automating vaccine data management & immunization registry integration

A single data entry interface for COVID-19 vaccinations — eliminating manual errors, easing the burden on the National Guard, and giving City leadership a real-time view of equity.

Goals & outcomes

Goals

  • 1 Expedite vaccine data collection and integration into Michigan’s immunization registry (MCIR)

  • 2 Reduce manual data entry errors and reliance on temporary staffing

  • Single data entry interface

  • Direct MCIR integration

  • Equity insights dashboard for City leadership

The challenge

To vaccinate Detroit’s population, the City took over a portion of the TCF downtown convention center and was instantly inundated with thousands of citizens seeking doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

While nursing teams were able to keep up with patient volume, the vaccinations required meticulous documentation in both the Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR) and Detroit’s own vaccination monitoring system. These duplicated efforts and the overall data entry workload required the City to bring on dozens of National Guard members to assist, and the manual nature of the work resulted in a high error rate that caused inventory and tracking logjams downstream.

The solution

By automatically ingesting data from the City’s patient appointment scheduling tool and prepopulating that data in a dashboard that connected directly to MCIR, People.Health created a tool that minimized manual data entry.

The system also flagged “problem” patients — those scheduled to receive doses from two different vaccine manufacturers, or scheduled to receive more than two doses — so that on-site staff could intervene and prevent potentially dangerous situations.

People.Health aggregated all of the data collected during the appointment scheduling and vaccination processes (age, race, ethnicity, disability status, dose number) to create an insights dashboard giving City leadership a high-level view of the patient population’s vaccination status.

The results

People.Health’s solution streamlined the vaccination data entry process and eliminated the errors caused by manual data entry, enabling the City to reduce its reliance on the National Guard and other temporary staff extensions.

“People.Health developed a seamless, single data entry interface to administer the vaccines, which gave us better operational visibility and helped our team work much more efficiently. Their collaboration with MiHIN in particular was immensely helpful to ensure that development was in line with State requirements and in sync with existing data pipelines.”