Open Forum

Hello,  I am wondering what your clinics use for documenting immunizations?  Our immunization standard work includes a waiting time of 15 minutes for any child 11-18 years of age and this gets documented in the smartphrase.  I am not crazy about the current immunization smartphrase we use and am curious if other clinics have any they could share.  I am looking for a smartphrase that would include the vaccines given (in a drop down) and option to pick VIS's that were given (in a drop down), but also want to capture that the patient did or did not agree to wait.  I will most likely need to create my own, but wanted to reach out in case anyone had some information on what they use! Thanks in advance!

Erin Riesenweber

ThedaCare RN Clinical Educator

ThedaCare Vaccine Education Specialist

Hi Marta,

Do you mind sharing, does the MAR documentation automatically link to the state's vaccine records?

We are using the Epic tab titled Immunizations to document administration of the ordered vaccine, but this tab does not have functionality to record diluents. It would be ideal to be able to record in the MAR to capture that information, as well as promote consistency in documentation.

Thank you so much!!!

This is so helpful, thank you Marta and J.J.! We were planning on having a pop up reminder to order the diluent in the MAR, but continue to document the main immunization within the immunization tab. However, the ability to move everything into the MAR is a very exciting possibility for our team! I will be bringing this our leaders, fingers crossed!

I don't know if this will help you, since we have a self-developed EHR system, but when a clinician orders a vaccine or a patient comes in during a nursing visit and the staff create their own documentation, we have pop-up boxes for the required documentation.  We enter vaccines into our electronic inventory by the NDC code, which captures brand information, lot number and expiration date when we place the curser over the "inventory" box and scan the vaccine.  We then choose the route, site and VIS given.  With some vaccines you might give more than one VIS.  We maintain the current VIS dates on the back end, so once the VIS type is chosen the date comes along with it. This is what it looks like:

I forgot to add that with our EHR, you can add a comment if needed, but except for teens, we are no longer having patients wait after the vaccine administration.  If we hold them in the exam room it delays care for other patients, and we lose track of them if they wait in the lobby. Teens are higher risk for fainting, so we watch them.

Also, we have a bi-directional HL7 interface with our immunization registry.  We do a nightly data dump of vaccine administration information and can receive information by "pinging" the registry for an updated record at any time.