Vaccination Records That Follow the Person
Sector: Public health authorities, ministries of health
The scenario
Anyone who has hunted for a childhood vaccination card knows the problem: the paper card is lost, the clinic that gave the shots has moved, and the school wants proof by Friday. Now imagine that at the scale of a country.
Picture a health authority with an immunization registry whose regions each extended in their own way, so the same data exists in incompatible versions. A child vaccinated in one region can look unvaccinated in another. Adding a vaccine to the national schedule takes months of coordination. And when a campaign is running, nobody can say in real time how many people are covered or who is overdue.
What goes wrong without the right tool
- Each region's variant of the model drifts, so records can't be compared or combined.
- Nothing reliably ties a child's records across regions to the same person.
- Every schedule change is a change request across all regions.
- Coverage numbers come from a data pipeline that takes weeks and is stale when it finishes.
How Atomik can be used
- Define the immunization event once. Vaccine, dose, lot number, where and by whom it was given, and any reaction, as an openEHR template. Reuse existing international archetypes and add national extensions.
- Keep the regional systems. Regions continue to use their point-of-care software, and an integration layer normalizes each event into the common template and commits it to Atomik through the REST API.
- Give each person one identity. Persons are managed as demographic records linked to their national identifier. Where the same person has more than one record, the Master Patient Index capabilities help resolve them.
- Turn coverage into stored queries. For example, "children between 6 months and 5 years without dose 2 of vaccine X in the last 12 months", using a SNOMED CT expression for the vaccine class so new products in that class are included.
- Evolve the schedule in one place. Adding a vaccine means uploading a new template version and updating the relevant queries; the data model is central.
- Support high availability. Clusters & Sync (premium) adds a secondary instance for read queries such as point-of-care lookups and coverage reports.
How CaboLabs can help
Atomik was built by CaboLabs, a company specialized in healthcare systems integration, data migration and consolidation, and clinical data management and audit. Besides the software, CaboLabs offers services that fit this scenario:
- openEHR modeling. Designing the immunization event template from existing archetypes and national extensions. See openEHR Implementation.
- Integration of the regional systems. Designing and implementing the interfaces that normalize each region's events and send them to Atomik. See HIS Integration.
- Data mapping and migration. Bringing the existing registry data and each regional variant into the common model. See Data Mapping & Migration.
None of this is required to use Atomik; you can do it with your own team or another provider. If you'd like to talk about your case, get in touch with CaboLabs.
What this gives you
A single definition of an immunization event, coverage questions answered from live data, and a record that follows the person across regions. Every event carries who recorded it, where and when.
Why Atomik fits
A national registry has to outlive vendors, regions and schedule changes. Atomik keeps the record in an open, versioned standard, and identity and clinical events live together, so "who is overdue?" doesn't require joining systems that were never meant to fit.