20/02/2018: As the field of medicine advances, the number of vaccine-preventable conditions grow dramatically, as does the number of routinely recommended immunisations. Each country implements its national immunisation schedule, which is, most of the time, based on WHO guidelines. Clinicians, on the other hand, find it difficult to monitor and consistently adhere to the national guidelines that are lengthy, complicated, and growing. Consequently, as routine immunisations become more numerous across a patient's life span, a physician's consult become more complex.
Galen Office is a fully integrated, cloud-based Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management System. New features are deployed continuously in frequent releases. Galen Office version 2.0 is now available online offering the new feature of Immunisation Decision Support. By taking into account the administered booster doses, the patient's age, gender and health status (e.g. chronic diseases) and the national guidelines, it determines the recommended immunisations and displays them.
A vast knowledge base, which is being curated by Ergobyte, is combined with rule-based algorithms in order to provide reliable results. The factors taken into account by those rules are minimum interval, incomplete series, gender, minimum age, simultaneous administration, contraindications and precautions, extra doses, etc. Every time the national immunisation guidelines are revised or published, our technical and clinical experts work to interpret and integrate them into the rule-engine.
Such a robust immunisation decision support tool is critical for any general practitioner or pediatrician who uses Electronic Health Record, leading to better patient outcomes and improved immunisation rates for the practice. Besides its direct clinical impact on the treatment of an individual patient, it can positively affect the quality of care at a population level.
