New online service to aid GPs in child vaccination

Irishhealth.com has unveiled a new service for GPs to assist them in providing timely vaccination reminders for children. This new service is a multi-user version of the award-winning Child Immunisation Tracker website. This provides practices with an online system to manage and track reminders for parents to ensure their child is fully immunised.

This new service was created in response to an initial request from Fairview Medical Centre, a large practice in north Dublin. The surgery recognised that the ability to track immunisation reminders for new babies born to the practice would be valuable for GPs as well as parents, and could be used to encourage parents to come in to the surgery to ensure that their child is fully immunised.

The web-based Tracker allows registered practices or individual GPs to set up secure online accounts where they can input details of new children born to the practice and have the system automatically generate reminder alerts for the practice when a child is due to be recalled for a vaccination. Development of the new service has been sponsored by Aptaclub (Aptamil’s online support programme for parents).

The Immunisation Tracker also provides a live feed of relevant child health news and alerts on disease outbreaks. The tool is available for parents and GPs online via the Irishhealth.com website. For parents wishing to manage their children's immunisations, a smartphone app version of the Child Immunisation Tracker can be downloaded at no cost for both iPhone and Android phone users and from the Aptaclub online resource.

Speaking at the announcement Dr Frank Broderick from Fairview Medical Centre said "There is a very good uptake for the primary immunisation scheme among babies at two, four and six months of age. The real challenge can be recalling infants and young children of 12 and 13 months to receive the MMR pneumococcus vaccine and the Hib booster and third meningococcal vaccine respectively. We are pleased to be able to incorporate this innovative method into our system, any new technology which can legitimately help with the day to day running of the surgery is a plus for us. Given that it is in compliance with the state's vaccination schedule it really is supporting our role and in turn improving the overall efficiency of the vaccination process in GPs surgeries. The new service can potentially help surgeries to reduce the administration work involved in recalling patients for immunisation".

Gillian O'Brien Medical Brand Manager Aptamil said: "Over the past year the app has been a very successful tool for parents and we're delighted to be able to extend the tracker for use in GP surgeries. We know that while some parents may choose to download the iPhone and Android version of the app and manage their own child's immunisations, many will not and the tool will now also be useful in helping to assist Healthcare Professionals in their role of advising and reminding parents about their child's vaccinations".

All data entered in the Irishhealth.com Child Immunisation Tracker website is protected by 256-bit SSL encryption to ensure the highest level of security for all data relating to babies and young children. This security has been extended to include the new general practice multi-user accounts. Over 10,500 Irish babies and young children are already registered with the web and app versions of the Child Immunisation Tracker, which won the 'Best Education App' award at Ireland's national Appys awards in November 2011.

The tracker provides a personalised vaccination schedule listing all of the current childhood vaccinations, when they are due and what they are for, as well as useful background information about the benefits of each immunisation and why they are important. All information is based on the most up to date vaccination guidelines for Ireland by the Royal College of Physicians.

Click here to download the iPhone version of the app and click here for the Android version. Both apps are free of charge.

[Posted: Fri 04/05/2012]