Everything You Need to Know About Immunizations

Executive Summary

Immunization tracking is a critical component of ensuring the health and safety of students in K-12 schools. High immunization rates protect communities from the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases and help maintain a healthy school environment.

But immunizations have become an increasingly political topic in the United States.

Today, we’ll explore the importance of immunization tracking, the challenges involved, best practices in immunization tracking in schools, immunization tracking technology considerations and solutions, and important legal compliance rules to effectively manage immunization records for your students. 

Introduction

As K-12 school leaders, you are entrusted with the responsibility of creating a safe and healthy learning environment for your students. Immunization tracking is a fundamental aspect of this responsibility.

Ensuring high immunization rates reduces the spread and severity of vaccine-preventable disease in your school communities, creating a safer and education-focused environment for students of all ages. As students grow and their brains develop, protection from disease is crucial, not only for their overall health, but also for their learning. This is especially true in environments where diseases and viruses like the flu, polio, tetanus and diphtheria, HPV, MMR and more can be passed easily from student to student.

Outbreaks interrupt education for everyone, not only students that are sick. Vaccines protect against these outbreaks, as well as new viruses that are still being studied for the impacts on brain development, like COVID-19.  

Immunization tracking involves the systematic collection, maintenance, and monitoring of students’ immunization records to ensure compliance with state and local vaccination requirements. And while the topic has become increasingly politicized, we’ll examine the process of immunization tracking, challenges you may face in tracking immunizations in your district, best practices for the tracking process, technology solutions and, finally, legal and ethical considerations.

Let’s dive in.

The Importance of Immunization Tracking 

Let’s flesh out the reasons immunizations are required in schools, and why effective tracking is so important. Infectious diseases have no boundaries, spreading easily through the air and on surfaces.

Schools, as large gathering sites, have an important responsibility to protect the health of students by implementing immunization tracking. Ultimately, immunization requirements and tracking ensure safety and help schools prevent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, and chickenpox.

By ensuring that a high percentage of students are vaccinated through school, local, and state policies and procedures, schools can create a herd immunity effect, protecting students and staff, even those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. 

In addition to protection of the general student body, immunization tracking vitally allows schools to protect students with weakened immune systems, allergies, or other medical conditions that prevent vaccination. These vulnerable students rely on herd immunity to stay safe. 

Immunization tracking also allows schools to comply with legal requirements and then archive immunization data as evidence of compliance. Most states and localities have laws mandating specific vaccinations for school enrollment. Proper immunization tracking helps schools comply with these legal requirements and avoid potential legal issues. 

Challenges in Immunization Tracking 

Having accurate data is crucial in the process of immunization tracking in a school environment and securing that data can potentially be a challenge. Data security in the case of immunization history is also important due to privacy concerns – schools need to comply with FERPA laws to protect students’ privacy. Challenges in all of these factors can arise due to human error, recordkeeping inconsistencies, and data entry issues.  

Additionally, making sure families are educated on vaccine importance and the students themselves have all standard vaccinations can be challenges of their own.

Though most states have laws that require students to be immunized against certain diseases before they can attend, on average, about one-fourth of preschool children are missing at least one routine vaccination. Especially since the onset of the pandemic, there’s also been a slight decline in the number of kindergartners who start school with all of their state-required vaccines (like DTaP, MMR, varicella), with rates dropping from 95% in 2019-2020 to 94% in 2020-2021 and then to 93% in 2021-2022.

These numbers present an average of rates across states, and for two years, don’t meet the Healthy People 2030 target of 95%, the level needed to prevent community transmission of measles. This is the lowest MMR rate reported in almost ten years.

When you break down the numbers, this means close to 250,000 school children are not fully vaccinated against measles, a highly contagious disease. 

If you take a look at vaccination rates among young children, you’ll notice that insurance makes a marked difference. 75.1% of children with private insurance were fully up to date on vaccines versus 47.9% of children who were uninsured. 65.1% of children insured via Medicaid were fully up to date.

For these reasons and because it is important no student’s education is delayed unnecessarily by incomplete records, ensuring that authorized personnel have quick access to immunization records while maintaining security is a challenge many schools face.

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Additionally, protecting students’ medical information is crucial. Striking a balance between tracking immunizations and respecting privacy rights can be complex. 

Best Practices in Immunization Tracking

Here are a few best practices in this process it’s important to outline. As district leaders, you should be spearheading strategies and procedures to:

• Establish clear immunization policies and communicate them effectively to parents and guardians. Look to state policy for guidance on structure and language. Dedicate a platform to educating families about the importance of immunization for their students and for the school community – dispel myths that could make families hesitant.
• Implement a well-organized system for collecting, storing, and updating immunization records, preferably in digital formats. That way, these online records can be accessed, assessed and updated quickly and efficiently.  
• Conduct regular audits of immunization records to identify discrepancies and ensure data accuracy. Check in on your schools chosen immunization tracking systems to make sure they are up-to-date and effective, especially as time goes on. This process will also allow your schools to identify under-vaccinated students and help close those gaps. 

Technology Resources for Immunization Tracking 

One technological solution comes in the form of electronic health records (EHR) systems.

Implementing these systems allows schools to digitize immunization records, improving data accuracy and accessibility, as well as inform community disease surveillance.

EHR systems help school nurses provide healthcare to the entire student body through many forms of data management: documentation, reporting, and real time aggregation and analysis of student data. These systems can help your district nurses identify health trends, track immunization compliance and develop strategic prevention measures. 

There is also specialized immunization tracking software that can automate recordkeeping, send reminders for upcoming vaccinations and generate reports for compliance monitoring. In a school environment, this type of software proves especially useful for helping schools track immunizations and comply with data privacy policies like FERPA. 

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Immunization Calculator: How much time could your team save on vaccine tracking?

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Frontline’s Immunization Registry Connection is an EHR system and immunization tracking software designed to be quick and easy, helping phase out manual tracking and saving time and money. By connecting your district with the immunization registry from your state, Frontline’s Immunization Registry Integration Services enables you to automatically import data from the registry with the click of a button.

The system is FERPA compliant and enables school nurses to save time throughout their day by providing efficient workflows and reporting that reveals which students are not up to date on vaccines and making communication with parents about vaccine updates easier. 

Our site provides a quick way to see the potential savings for a specific school or nurse. There is a calculator that estimates the amount of time (ex. 41 hours of data entry for 500 students) and money your team could save on immunization data entry if it didn’t have to be done manually.

Legal and Ethical Considerations 

Data security measures are vital in protecting students’ immunization data. It’s important to employ robust cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive immunization data from breaches. With an increasing number of institutions moving towards electronic health records, it’s both easier and riskier to share and store health information. There are strategies your schools can look for in their chosen EHR systems that will facilitate FERPA compliance and meet requirements designed to keep sensitive data secure. 

Typically, schools ensure compliance with state immunization requirements by requesting immunization records from parents, who then request them from their child’s health care provider.  The HIPAA Privacy Rule permits a covered health care provider to disclose proof of immunization directly to a school that is required by law to have such proof prior to admitting a student, with the oral or written agreement of a parent or guardian.  

As a reminder, here are the high-level details of student privacy policies that must be considered and complied with when choosing student immunization tracking: 

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects the privacy of a student’s education records, including relevant medical records, and gives parents certain rights, since parents facilitate transfer of records from doctors to their children’s schools.  

Conclusion

Immunization tracking is a vital component of K-12 school leadership. By understanding its importance, overcoming challenges, adopting best practices, leveraging technology solutions such as Frontline’s Immunization Registry Connection, and adhering to legal and ethical standards, school leaders can ensure the health and safety of their students and the broader community. This white paper provides K-12 school leaders with tools and plans of action to accomplish this goal. By prioritizing immunization tracking, schools can create a safer and healthier learning environment for their students and staff while complying with legal requirements and respecting privacy rights.