Scheduling Vaccinations: A New Online Tool for Parents and Pediatricians

I hope this posting finds readers refreshed after a relaxing Memorial Day weekend! Just in case you’re not back into the swing of things, here’s a reminder that the ASCO annual conference is under way this week, and if you’re not going, you can still listen in to the podcasts (the information on how to sign up is posted). The abstracts have been released and you can read about the pediatric presentations.

On another note, the Georgia Institute of Technology (known to those of us in the South as simply “Georgia Tech”) has recently announced the development of a downloadable tool for creating individualized vaccination schedules when a child has missed a vaccination.

According to a report by researchers at the CDC (published in the current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine), up to 28% of toddlers haven’t received vaccinations according to US guidelines. Of the children that were not compliant with the recommended schedule, two thirds had missed an entire vaccine dose.

Maybe this isn’t news to you, especially when your staff has to sit down and manually figure out how to get these kids back on track. However, this new tool is supposed to eliminate — or at least, minimize - that headache. You can read more about the tool, and you can download it. It’s for children aged 6 years and younger.

The tool is an example of dynamic programming, in which multiple options are pared down to provide the optimal solution. I’m curious to hear about what the user experience is — if you’ve used it already, please let us know your impressions and if it really did save your office time!