Patient Encounter Tracking Enhances Vaccine Management

The Challenge: Modernizing Antiquated Systems to Track VA Employee Vaccinations

As part of its services, EOH gathers and updates consistent, reportable data about VA employees’ current and past vaccine immunizations. For years, the agency tracked this employee health information with a variety of antiquated systems that failed to meet the demand, pace, and data integrity needed. These limitations and vulnerabilities peaked when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

A new centralized platform and application were needed to enable EOH staff members across the nation to quickly find VA employees and get up-to-date data about their immunization status. The application would provide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with recipients’ demographic and immunization data to contribute to nationwide tracking of COVID-19 immunization progress.

The Solution: Streamlining VA Care with Next-Gen Vaccination Management Software

Following an in-depth review of customizable software options, Booz Allen helped the agency implement the Occupational Health Record-keeping System 2.0 (OHRS 2.0), the first Salesforce application deployed on the new Government Cloud Plus infrastructure. The system’s flexibility and guided-user experience help streamline and simplify the capture of employee vaccination information.

To expand its functions, this solution was subsequently integrated with additional software packages like Health Cloud and Service Cloud to provide a core platform for EOH record-keeping.

The Impact: Tracking Vaccinations to Aid Veterans During the Pandemic

Since the implementation of OHRS 2.0, the agency has logged over 934,000 VA employee COVID-19 vaccinations. The system captures data consistently across the nation, enabling VA leadership to review and assess aggregated metrics in real time. In addition, OHRS 2.0 is capturing over 26,800 new flu and general VA employee immunizations per month, a 150% increase over the previous rate of capture with legacy systems and methods. PeopleSoft integration keeps assignment information updated daily for more than 483,000 VA employees, facilitating enterprise-wide reporting.

Migrating millions of legacy EOH records into OHRS 2.0 for tracking vaccinations and trend analysis is just the beginning. Employees can now request respirator medical clearances via a self-service Experience Cloud site, and documents can be generated to confirm clearances and vaccination history with disease protection status. The agency can document and track employee return-to-work plans, and interaction with external electronic health record systems is now feasible with the HL7 and FHIR standards support provided by Salesforce Health Cloud.