The Swiss electronic vaccination record

At www.myvaccines.ch, a secure website, as a professional health worker you can, free of charge:

• register your patients' vaccinations in an electronic vaccination record...
• verify / validate the data entered by your patients...
• print official vaccination records as often as you wish...
• identify incomplete vaccinations, including those recommended or contraindicated because of risk factors or personal choices...
• identify the recommended vaccinations before a trip (NEW)

Since 2013, all the functions of the expert system viavac are available on www.myvaccines.ch:

• Immediate access to the catchup vaccination plan (names of available vaccines, number of doses, intervals...)
• Disply of comments explaining the calculations of the software for each antigen/vaccine...
• Possibility to manually validate vaccines given a bit earlier or later than according to the rules of the software d...
• Immediate identification of patients who are not up-to-date for one or several vaccines, and the possibility to contact them directly through a web-based distribution list...

Because...

• one doesn't trust important patient information to a piece of paper...
• to find a patient's vaccination data and to reconstitute a lost vaccination record takes considerable time...
• your patients are sometimes taken care of by other health professionals, for example during an emergency, whilst traveling or after moving house...
• when your patients don't know their vaccination history, you have to re-administer some vaccines which might not be necessary...
• sometimes your patients forget to come back and complete their vaccinations...
• you don't have enough free time to regularly ensure that your patients' vaccinations are up to date - even though you know that 15-25% of children, adolescents or adults are not up to date with their vaccinations...
• it takes too much time to systematically identify the vaccines necessary to your patients who are at risk due to a medical problem, professional problem or exposure...
• it takes too much time to regularly establish vaccinal assessments and individual booster plans - so complex has it become ...

To use www.myvaccines.ch as a health professional, simply open a secured professional account, the EAN /GLN number serving as authentication.

This registration gives access to a number of functions:

1. Validation of electronic vaccination records built up by your patients
   To avoid errors in data input and to prevent the fabrication of false certificates (!), to register one's vaccinations in www.myvaccines.ch allows the management and printing, in alphabetical order, of the list of vaccines registered - in a format that is NOT that of an official vaccination record.
   In order to manage a vaccination record in an official format, the vaccine registrations must be validated by a health professional. Thus, the patients are invited to give access authorization to their doctors / pharmacists, so they may enter the patient's dossier to complete it, or correct the data, and then validate them. This validation then generates an official vaccination record, having the same legal status as the "blue and white" vaccination record distributed by the Federal Office of Public Health, and which can be printed as often as necessary - both by the patient and the professional.
2. Temporary access to a vaccination record
   It isn't unusual to question the immunization situation of a patient one doesn't know well, whether it be in the emergency department after an injury, whilst on call, or whilst replacing someone. A temporary access code (or the correct answer to a question known only to the patient) has been implemented so that any health professional to whom a patient authorizes access to his/her file, can see at a glance the vaccines received and decide whether or not a vaccination is up to date.
3. Creation of a vaccination record for one's patients
   If www.myvaccines.ch puts the patient at the center of the process, it also permits professionals to generate their patients' vaccination records themselves. In effect, it will take only a few minutes for a professional, or more often his/her assistant, to generate a vaccination record in www.myvaccines.ch. Automatically validated, the record can be printed immediately and given to the patient at the end of the consultation. If the patient so wishes, he/she can then have access to the complete, validated, electronic vaccination record, thanks to an access code.
4. Identification of incomplete vaccinations
   Every health professional, having accessed a patient's vaccination record, can carry out a vaccine assessment, which indicates instantly the completed vaccinations (green code) or missing vaccinations (red code). It still remains, of course, to determine why certain vaccinations are incomplete, to calculate the number of missing doses, to chose the intervals between the doses and to identify the necessary vaccines, available in Switzerland, to complete them... unless he/she benefits from a Viavac license, permitting immediate access to all this information!

The integration of the Viavac software into the website www.myvaccines.ch offers a perfect synergy to professionals who have a Viavac licence.

1. At www.myvaccines.ch, a ready to use vaccine catch-up plan
   Health professionals who are holders of a Viavac license have access at www.myvaccines.ch to a detailed vaccine catch-up plan - which specifies which of the vaccines available in Switzerland must be given, how many doses and at what intervals. If the vaccinations are carried out during the consultation, clicking on their names adds them to the vaccination record, which is immediately up to date. This function allows the vaccination record, containing a list of vaccines received AND all future vaccinations, with dates of the next booster doses, to be printed and handed to the patient immediately. A quite frequent situation is portrayed in migrant children - with or without vaccination records. This situation has been foreseen, and the web service www.myvaccines.ch suggests a vaccine strategy adapted to each age, when the vaccination record is missing and the previous vaccinations are unknown.
2. Exchange of data with www.myvaccines.ch
   Since 2012, Viavac and www.myvaccines.ch are interfaced: it requires only one click for a patient's data to be transferred from Viavac to www.myvaccines.ch - for example, to generate an electronic vaccination record for a patient. Inversely, only one click is sufficient to import into Viavac a file constituted by a patient on www.myvaccines.ch, saving considerable time.

A complete functional interface already exists between www.myvaccines.ch, Viavac and the patient's electronic file from the Caisse des Médecins. Administrative interfaces also already exist between Viavac and several general practice management softwares.

The goal being that vaccination data taken from any system might be automatically directed towards Viavac, without further input, Viavac has been developed with a "Geräge-Daten-Transfer-Interface", allowing the exchange of data between all software developers. It is the same with www.myvaccines.ch - and we are looking forward to beginning the necessary work so that data as central as vaccinations can be easily exchanged.