During my National Library of Medicine (NLM) Informatics Fellowship in the early 1990's I participated in one of the original
20 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation "All Kids Count" immunization registry 1-year Planning Grants for Allegheny County, PA. Since then
I have been active in multiple immunization registry efforts, including Co-Chair of the Pennsylvania Statewide Immunization
Information System (SIIS) Task Force from 1994-1998, member of the CDC's Immunization Clinical Decision Support
(CDSi) expert panel
from 2011-2012, and participant in the CDC's 2013 Immunization Registry Blue Ribbon Panel.
From 2011 through 2017 I programmed interfaces between Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Tennessee State Immunization
Registry (TennIIS), sending
and receiving data through batch processing of HL7 messages between secure servers using sFTP (see details).
I also programmed the integration of the results of the queries into Vanderbilt's then-home-grown electronic health record (EHR), Starpanel -
displaying query status on an Outpatient Whiteboard and an immunization reconciliation screen comparing EHR and outside data. This was
replaced by a commercial EHR on Nov 2, 2017.
Most recently I have served as co-chair of the Immunization Integration Program
(IIP) Executive Committee,
leading efforts that began in 2019 and include HIMSS, CDC, AIRA, and the Drummond Group to form an
IIP Collaborative
(addl info at AIRA's site) dealing with multiple EHR-IIS interoperability issues. In 2021 I was a presenter at HIMSS and the
AAP National Conference
on the topic of handling Acknowledgement (ACK) messages from registries, one of the priority issues identified by the Collaborative.
I was honored to be the recipient of Tennessee's first Childhood Immunization Champion Award from the CDC in 2012.
I also received a Prime Participation Award
from the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) in August, 2021 and an
Exiting Excellence Award
from AIRA in April, 2022.