WA-CHIP Immunizations Cohort #4 Kicks Off in March
Ariana Salaiz
WCAAP Program Manager
Our Washington Child Health Improvement Partnership (WA-CHIP) supports a Learning Collaborative to improve childhood and adolescent vaccination rates – which could not be more important now – with so much disrupted care over the past two years and the pandemic.
Our fourth cohort of the Immunizations Learning Collaborative is kicking off in March 2022! We provide coaching from expert faculty from WCAAP, Seattle Children’s and Public Health – Seattle & King County, and a community of peer clinics from which to learn. The project helps clinics implement meaningful, feasible, and sustained focus on childhood and adolescent vaccines.
Through this clinic-wide intervention pediatricians and family physicians of participating clinics can earn MOC credits as well as CME credits, while gaining access to tools to improve vaccination rates.
If you’d like to learn more about the WA-CHIP adolescent and childhood immunizations learning collaborative feel free to visit our WA-CHIP website and contact asalaiz@wcaap.org.
What previous participants have said:
“Working through this project has made it apparent how incredibly challenging vaccine counseling is for the hesitant crowd partly due to provider fears that extending conversations may potentially damage an otherwise therapeutic relationship.”
Benton Huang, MD, Cohort 3
“Participating in the WA-CHIP Learning Collaborative this year has really impacted our clinic. The WA-CHIP Learning Collaborative has helped us dive into our own clinic’s immunization data and see where our strengths and weaknesses lie, and how we together, as a team, can implement changes that will improve the health and well-being of our patients. Without this partnership, our clinic would have never known the percentage of missed opportunities of adolescent immunizations outside of our preventive health visits. With this partnership and the guidance from our coach, we were able to collaborate and really focus our efforts on making sure those eligible for immunizations are aware of it. Specifically, our clinic was able to implement a workflow which identifies patients who are scheduled for non-preventative health visits and are in need of vaccines. From there, a pop-up is created into the patient’s chart which will ensure that the provider sees this and can notify patient and family, thus increasing vaccination opportunities.”
Kitsap Children’s Clinic, Cohort 3
“The WA-CHIP Learning Collaborative has given us momentum and purpose. It has helped our team be intentional and keep a clinic-wide conversation active on adolescent immunizations. The Learning Collaborative has provided us a relentless focus on adolescent immunizations. Not only has it helped our clinic teams focus on adolescent immunization rates, but it has also created a blueprint for new work on vaccination rates for all ages.”
Marcus Baca, MD, Cohort 2
“A month after the WA-CHIP project, on our internal audit, February is the first month we achieved our goal of > 65% of our 13-year-old patients being up to date on their adolescent vaccine bundle. It was very exciting.”
Lauren Athay, MD, Cohort 2