HLN Releases New Version of Award Winning Open Source Immunization Forecaster

Innovative open source software, originally developed for public health, is freely available to EHR and PHR systems to support clinical decision support for immunizations.

PALM DESERT, Calif. - March 15, 2018 - PRLog -- HLN released a new version (v1.11.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) on March 9, 2018. ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support (CDS) for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems.

The release includes support for Earliest Date and Overdue Date for immunizations that are forecasted. If enabled, ICE will output two additional forecast dates along with the existing Recommendation Date: the Earliest Date and Overdue Date. The Earliest Date is the soonest date that the vaccine can be given and still be considered valid. The Overdue Date is the date after which an immunization administered would be considered late.

In this release, ICE returns the earliest and overdue dates for 4 vaccine groups: Meningococcal ACWY, Polio, Rotavirus and Varicella. The ICE team expects the remaining vaccine groups will be completely supported in future releases of ICE in Spring 2018.

Dr. Noam Arzt"Support for Earliest Date/Overdue Date is an important functional improvement for ICE," said Dr. Noam Arzt, President of HLN, "In addition, we have expanded our advisory structure, adding a national Review Board of experts to supplement our existing Subject Matter Expert Workgroup," adding that, "ICE is well positioned as a superior, community-driven, open source CDS solution for immunizations."

The latest ICE Implementation Guide (v2r19) describes how implementers should update their installation and software to properly read the Earliest, Recommended, and Overdue dates. The relevant information starts on page 43. Note that a "track changes" version of this same guide is also available. The tracked changes are intended to make it easier for the reader to see what has changed in the Guide since the prior release of the ICE Implementation Guide (v2r18).

The full software release is available for download at https://cdsframework.atlassian.net/wiki/display/ICE/Downloads.

The Immunization Calculation Engine, or ICE, is a fully configurable vaccine forecasting/decision support web service tool. Making patient-specific vaccine decisions based on US Government American Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations is a very complex task. It requires translating ACIP recommendations - the detailed rules that examine a patient's immunization history and determine if all vaccinations are valid, and what vaccinations might be missing - into computable language for clinical decision support. ICE evaluates a patient's immunization history and generates the appropriate immunization recommendations for the patient. These recommendations are communicated to the clinician at the point of care, as well as the patient, health department or other users.

Among the many useful and advanced features of ICE is that it includes a Clinical Decision Support Administration Tool. This tool enables subject matter experts to manage ICE rules and configuration without the need for software developers. In addition, ICE has maximum flexibility for supporting multiple schedules (for instance a clinical schedule and a school-compliance schedule), a robust testing tool, and can support implementation at any scale. ICE began as a component of public health Immunization Information Systems which gather and consolidate immunization information within a jurisdiction for public health surveillance and clinical support.

In developing ICE, HLN worked with the New York City Citywide Immunization Registry (CIR), the Alabama Department of Public Health, and the OpenCDS collaboration which is led by researchers at the University of Utah's, Department of Biomedical Informatics. ICE is now in use, or being configured for use, by several governmental Immunization Information Systems (NJIIS), electronic health record (EHR) systems (including eClinicalWorks), and the CareDox personal health record. Other EHRs, personal health record (PHR) systems, and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) can be easily adapted to incorporate ICE logic and clinical decision support into their systems.

Please feel free to e-mail [email protected] if you have any questions.

About HLN

For more than twenty years HLN has been a leading public health informatics consulting company focused on developing and supporting robust technical solutions addressing pressing public health needs. HLN is dedicated to the development, improvement, promulgation, and use of Open Source solutions in health information technology. Much of our Open Source work is focused on clinical decision support (CDS) applications built using OpenCDS, an open source clinical decision support platform, including our Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) and Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) which is supporting the national strategy of electronic case reporting to public health. RCKMS is being funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and deployed centrally to determine if a patient's symptoms and conditions require reporting to one or more public health jurisdictions.

More information on HLN Consulting and its open source products can be found at https://www.hln.com.

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