At the April 2026 AIRA National Meeting, our team was proud to contribute three accepted abstracts that tackled some of the most pressing challenges facing Immunization Information Systems (IIS) today – sustainability, growing data demands, and the realities of patient matching at scale.
Across these sessions, a common theme emerged: meaningful progress doesn’t come from chasing perfection, but from intentionally designing systems, workflows, and partnerships that are resilient, scalable, and grounded in real‑world use cases. Below is a closer look at the sessions we presented and the insights shared with the AIRA community.
Adapting to a Constantly Changing Landscape
Presented by Gary Wheeler, Executive Vice President & General Manager
Public health programs operate in an environment defined by constant change – shifting funding structures, evolving policy priorities, and increasing expectations placed on IIS teams. In Adapting to a Constantly Changing Landscape, Gary Wheeler explored practical strategies for maintaining sustainability without sacrificing mission or performance.
The session focused on rethinking traditional approaches to contracting and funding, including collaborative contracting models, meaningful interim deliverables, and non‑traditional funding avenues such as HEDIS alignment, Medicaid match opportunities, legislative partnerships, and foundation funding. Gary also highlighted the importance of maximizing existing investments – asking how IIS platforms can support broader public health use cases to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale.
A key takeaway was the role of AI as a job enhancer, not an eliminator. When used thoughtfully, AI can help reduce manual effort, streamline workflows, and create cost savings – provided security, privacy, and policy considerations are addressed from the start.
Doing More With Less: Empowering IIS Programs Through Self‑Service
Presented in partnership with state IIS leaders
As IIS programs face increasing demand for data without corresponding staff growth, self‑service has moved from a “nice‑to‑have” to a strategic necessity. Doing More With Less demonstrated how intentionally designed, analytics‑ready self‑service can help programs meet these demands in a repeatable and sustainable way.
Drawing on real‑world examples from Arkansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Missouri, the session showed how curated data access, bring‑your‑own‑tool flexibility, and automation dramatically reduced reporting timelines – from days or months down to minutes or seconds. These approaches not only improved efficiency but also increased trust in the data and gave teams the space to focus on higher‑value analytical and programmatic work.
A central lesson from the session was that self‑service must be treated as a product, not just a feature. When thoughtfully designed with governance, usability, and repeatability in mind, the benefits extend far beyond a single report or use case.
When Good Matches Go Bad: How and Where Patient Matching Is Applied in IIS
Presented by Kevin Snow
Patient matching is often framed as an algorithm problem – but When Good Matches Go Bad challenged that assumption. Kevin Snow’s session shifted the focus to how, where, and when matching is applied within IIS workflows, and how those decisions can have wide‑ranging impacts on data quality, system performance, and trust.
Using real‑world testing and production examples, the session illustrated how reasonable, well‑intentioned design choices can lead to false‑positive matches, missed matches, and cascading data quality issues – especially in interconnected environments like IZ Gateway. Attendees explored the importance of understanding matching use cases, profiling traffic across different workloads (HL7, HEDIS, interactive search), and avoiding over‑reliance on identifiers as proof of identity.
The session emphasized practical safeguards such as operational logging, traffic profiling, staging environments that mirror production behavior, and aligning best‑record and consolidation logic with AIRA best practices. The key message: the return on investment from improving how matching is applied can outweigh continued algorithm tuning alone.
Continuing the Conversation
These abstracts reflect real‑world challenges IIS programs are navigating today and practical approaches to addressing them. Across sustainability, self‑service, and patient matching, a common thread emerges: durable solutions come from understanding context, designing intentionally, and aligning technology with how systems are actually used in practice.
We invite you to explore each abstract in full to dive deeper into the strategies, lessons learned, and examples shared with the AIRA community. Whether you’re rethinking funding models, expanding self‑service capabilities, or evaluating how patient matching operates within your workflows, these sessions are intended to spark ideas, inform decision‑making, and support continued learning across IIS programs.
If you have questions or would like to continue the conversation sparked by any of these abstracts, we welcome the opportunity to connect.