Australian Immunisation Register and US
January 29th, 2018
The Australian Immunisation Register ( AIR ) has been touted with much fanfare, but still has a few problems… in that not all doctors software is compatible with it. Our software for example is not.
Computer experts all over the country are working on getting all the software of Aussie doctors to work seamlessly together, but we are not quite there yet.
Currently, in order for us at Dr Deb’s to enter vaccines onto the AIR, we need to logon to a secure portal, find the patient, enter each vaccine, dose number and date. This is very time consuming and our medical staff just do not have time to do that with the many vaccines we give every day. This time is not covered under medicare.
AIR is certainly a great idea. In the paper era, many doctors surgeries did not have good systems for recording and accessing immunisation records. Even if they did have good records, doctors records only have to be kept for 7 years from the date of last entry. Many vaccines (eg Hepatitis A, B, Yellow Fever), last for a lot longer than 7 years – they last for life. Good records mean patients avoid the need to repeat doses of vaccines because of lost records.
OUR CLINIC RECORDS
We keep our records indefinitely and have records going back to July 1988 when Dr Deb started the clinic. The earlier records are still on paper and stored at a ministorage facility. This means to access the recors, it takes staff time to get in a car, go to the facility, and extract the files. Later records – 2001 onwards – are mostly stored electronically. We also have a good computer backup system.
We strongly encourage persons to make a big effort to track their own vaccination records.
We issue all our patients with a yellow immunisation record book. Dr Deb developed a (free) vaccine record app for smartphones so the records can be held in ones smart phone.
However if we do have to replace your vaccine records from our files, the medical staff have to consult the file to prepare a new vaccination book or letter, this all takes time and we have to bill for this time as it is a user-pays system.
Costs for replacement vaccination records are
$25 for a new vaccination book and $9 if replacement vaccine book required during consultation.
