175 COVID-19 Vaccination Sites Tap Cerner EHR Solution

Cerner has announced 175 COVID-19 vaccination sites have leveraged its Mass Vaccination EHR solution to help clinicians identify, register, and vaccinate patients.

When COVID-19 began to spread in early 2020, the EHR vendor reached out to its customers across the country to ensure they had the necessary health IT to prepare for a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination effort.

Since many hospitals and health systems worked together to deploy the vaccination at community-based locations, Cerner leaders knew these vaccination sites would need a patient-first strategy that could work outside of each users’ EHR platform.

The EHR vendor compiled a list of various recommendations for its clients to utilize its health IT to boost billing, clinician administration best practices, patient outreach, scheduling opportunities, and both reporting and analytics following each vaccination.

Cerner then provided its customers with its Mass Vaccination solution to increase vaccination deployment speeds, boost patient care, and help users with administration documentation.

The solution aims to help clinicians register patients and then identify, administer, and document the COVID-19 vaccine. All in one workflow, the solution provides the clinician with relevant patient data from the EHR to streamline the vaccination process, while also notifying the user of important patient information such as drug and allergy interactions.

Northern Light Health in Maine, Cook County Health in Illinois, the US Department of Defense (DoD), the US Coast Guard, and Truman Medical Centers and University Health in Missouri are a few of the health systems that leveraged Cerner for its vaccination technology.

Employees at Northern Light Health have administered roughly 3,000 COVID-19 vaccinations per week and they expect this number to increase as more doses become available.

Across its five locations in Chicago, Cook County Health utilized Cerner technology to administer around 18,000 doses a week.

The DoD and US Coast Guard are both using the Mass Vaccination software to administer the COVID-19 vaccine.

Truman Medical Centers and University Health in the Kansas City metro area became one of the first 150 hospitals across the country and the first in its area to receive and successfully administer the vaccine.

Truman Medical Centers had to optimize its EHR workflow to send its vaccine notifications to Missouri’s ShowMeVax reporting program. Medical center employees worked with the CDC and the state to prepare a vaccination plan to hit the most recent guidelines.

While the hospital had the vaccination system set up in its workflow for other vaccinations, Heather Gleason, senior director IT applications at Truman Medical, told EHRIntelligence she wanted to integrate the technology into the daily workflow to maintain patient safety.

“We looked to Cerner as a partner because they had a playbook for mass vaccination that was previously utilized at a couple of test sites,” Gleason said. “We wanted to integrate ‘smart technology’ to make sure that we can get people quickly in and out of the vaccination process.”

All of the vaccine components were in place in the workflow, but clinicians never used each part of the solution at the same time. As a result, Gleason and her team had to make an adjustment.

“First, we use the revenue cycle program to schedule the patients,” Gleason explained. “Then when the patient arrives for her appointment, she checks in at a kiosk application to give her name, date of birth, address, and answer a series of questions to properly identify herself and for reporting after the vaccine is administered.”

Additionally, Cerner partnered with several municipalities and nearby hospitals to assemble a mass vaccination event for the Kansas City metro area. The trio helped vaccinate roughly 4,500 every other week and plans to increase that number to 3,500 per day in the near future.