title: Implementing broad scale childhood immunization decision support as a web service.
abstract: Timely vaccinations decrease a child's risk of contracting vaccine-preventable disease and prevent disease outbreaks. Childhood immunization schedules may represent the only clinical guideline for which there is official national consensus. So an immunization clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a natural application. However, immunization schedules are complex and change frequently. Maintaining multiple CDSS's is expensive and error prone. Therefore, a practical strategy would be an immunization CDSS as a centralized web service that can be easily accessed by various electronic medical record (EMR) systems. This allows centralized maintenance of immunization guidelines. We have developed a web service, based on Miller's tabular model with modifications, which implements routine childhood immunization guidelines. This immunization web service is currently operating in the Regenstrief Institute intranet and system evaluations are ongoing. We will make this web service available on the Internet. In this paper, we describe this web service -based immunization decision support tool.
authors.affiliation: Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Vivienne J
authors.initials: VJ
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Shaun J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Grannis
authors.forename: Marc B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Rosenman
authors.forename: Stephen M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Downs
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002648:Child; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D006801:Humans; D007115:Immunization Schedule; D020407:Internet; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D014611:Vaccination; D014612:Vaccines / Q000008:administration & dosage
chemical_list: D014612:Vaccines