Good decisions depend on good data. When it comes to immunization information systems, public health professionals need access to the most up-to-date, accurate, and exhaustive data. This helps them better understand specific vaccination and disease rates across their jurisdiction, which can inform strategic public health interventions, minimize waste, and ensure resources are used wisely.
Yet, hospitals, pharmacies, and physician offices sometimes find HL7 onboarding to be a complex and time-intensive endeavor. For example, providers may be confused by the technical nature of HL7 or fail to understand what types of data need to be shared with public health departments. Oftentimes, data elements are missing, creating critical gaps that can lead to inaccurate conclusions or an inefficient use of resources. Historically, determining what data is wrong or missing has been a herculean task, requiring staff to manually sift through electronic health records, flag cases for further review, and contact providers detailing the data that is needed.
Fortunately, business analytics tools like Power BI, which is integrated into WebIZ, allow users to create data visualizations, address gaps in immunization information, and speed up HL7 onboarding processes. In seconds, Power BI can create a visual overview of provider completeness, analyze traffic to show performance scores and volume across providers, highlight error messages and error count, estimate how long it might take to onboard a new provider, and much more.
By helping users analyze data efficiently, Power BI can help you better utilize staff time and resources. Even more importantly, public health departments can utilize Power BI within WebIZ to improve public health by helping teams make faster, more informed decisions with the most accurate information.
Consider how some states are utilizing Power BI through WebIZ:
- Noticing an uptick in Unknown/Undetermined VFC eligibility (V00) values, one state utilized the HL7 message analyzer to create a list of participants who submitted the most V00 submissions, allowing staff to coordinate with them to reduce this volume.
- After being contacted by neighboring jurisdictions about exchanging COVID-19 immunization data for residents crossing state borders to get vaccinated, one state was able to provide flat files with neighboring immunization information systems.
- Upon learning that an EHR had a cybersecurity issue, public health staff in one state swiftly identified which clinics were sending data from that EHR and asked them to temporarily turn off their connections with the EHR as a security measure.
- When approached by researchers about its HPV vaccination rate for a study on cancer, one state used Power BI to generate a list of 1.1 million immunizations for CVX 62 and 165 for researchers to crosswalk with diagnoses codes.
How is your department utilizing Power BI to streamline the HL7 onboarding process? Let us know!