Lessons Learned from Houston Methodist Academic Medicine Associates
At Houston Methodist, Archana Sadhu, MD, FACE has had a long-standing practice of talking to her patients with diabetes about the importance of vaccines. Since becoming one of AACE’s health system partners in the CDC-funded grant, Specialty Societies Advancing Adult Immunizations, Dr. Sadhu has found success in using one of AACE’s patient tools in these patients' conversations: AACE’s Patient Vaccine Bingo Pocket Card.
Starting from the bottom:
First row: Stephen Jones, MD
Second row (from the left): Abhishek Kansara MD, Archana Sadhu, MD, Spandana Brown, MD and Charlie Nicolas
Third row (from the left): Samaneh Dowlatshahi MD, Bhargavi Patham MD, and Megan Taubert
Fourth row (from the left) Keena Andrus, Raquel Martinez, and Stephanie Hernandez
Top row (from the left): Alethia Williams, K’yerra Taylor, and Tresa Jellison
Using AACE’s Patient Vaccine Bingo Card in Multiple Ways
Dr. Sadhu uses AACE’s Vaccine Bingo card to not only initiate a conversation with her patients about which vaccines they need, but also with what priority. When talking to a patient in June, when there is no flu vaccine available, she would still recommend they get the flu vaccine – but would rank it lower than other vaccines the patient is missing and could get at that point in time.
Dr. Sadhu has also been able to use AACE’s Vaccine Bingo card to recommend timeframes for patients to get vaccinated if they aren’t current on multiple vaccines. Providing recommended timeframes has enabled Dr. Sadhu to mitigate patient stress and confusion about needing multiple vaccines. She is creating a vaccination plan for each patient using the card, which she has seen success in patients implementing! When a returning patient showed Dr. Sadhu her updated Vaccine Bingo Card, reflecting the vaccinations she had received since her last visit, she knew she had a success story!
Using a New Dot Phrase in the EHR
In addition to using patient education materials, Houston Methodist has also made changes to their EHR (EPIC). The team at Houston Methodist has added a dot phrase to help them better track vaccination practices. The dot phrase has been used as part of their quality improvement initiatives to help them track vaccine documentation and recommendations, two key components of the CDC’s Standards for Adult Immunization Practice. In addition, according to Dr. Sadhu, use of the dot phrase is another tool to help providers in her practice initiate a conversation with the patient because use of the dot phrase pulls the patient’s vaccine history into a table to make it easy for the provider to identify vaccine care gaps.
Next up for Houston Methodist is using a dot phrase to document and differentiate patient "refusals" from "declines." According to Dr. Sadhu, sometimes patients are open to receiving a vaccination but don’t want to do so immediately. She wants the providers at Houston Methodist to know when a patient is declining as opposed to refusing. This kind of differentiation will be helpful to the provider when the patient returns for future appointments.
Great work, Houston Methodist!