(Press-News.org) Promoting immunizations as a part of routine office-based medical practice is needed to improve adult vaccination rates, a highly effective way to curb the spread of diseases across communities, prevent needless illness and deaths, and lower health care costs, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Increasingly, vaccinations are being offered outside of physician offices at pharmacies, workplaces and retail medical clinics. Even so, office-based medical practice continues to be central to the delivery of recommended vaccinations to adults.
"Regardless of where vaccines are actually administered, office-based providers are uniquely positioned to identify patients who need vaccination, to communicate credibly about the benefits and risks of vaccination, and to ensure that vaccination histories are properly maintained," said Katherine Harris, the study's lead author and a senior economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.
The RAND study outlines improvements needed to strengthen the role of office-based medical providers to promote vaccination to adult patients. These include creating tools to improve communications between patients and providers about vaccinations, and stronger incentives to encourage health providers to refer patients to community sites that administer vaccinations if they do not offer them.
Diseases that can be readily prevented by vaccines take a heavy toll on adults in the United States despite the wide-spread availability of this generally safe and effective preventive care. The yearly health care and productivity costs blamed on influenza -- a common illness that can be prevented by vaccination -- is as high as $90 billion, depending on the severity of the annual outbreak.
In contrast to childhood vaccination rates, which are generally high, adult vaccination rates remain disappointingly low. Even in the case of influenza, inoculation rates for even those at the highest risk of death do not exceed 70 percent. Vaccines recommended for adults can prevent influenza, pneumococcal sepsis, shingles, hepatitis A and B, pertussis (whooping cough) and the human papillomavirus -- the leading cause of cervical cancer.
Researchers say recent changes in the policy and practice environments provide a unique window of opportunity to improve the delivery of vaccinations to adults. Health care reform legislation promotes preventive care and improves financial access to adult vaccinations.
RAND researchers identified bottlenecks that have stalled delivery of adult vaccinations and propose strategies to overcome these shortcomings. Their effort included a review of past research about adult vaccination, a stakeholder workshop, interviews with experts, and a short telephone survey of adults to learn about the relationship between influenza vaccination and public beliefs and misperceptions about its safety.
The study reports that while medical offices are the location where most adults receive vaccinations, only about one-fourth of physician offices stock all recommended vaccines for adults. Reasons include the fact that some vaccines have a short shelf life and insurance payments for administering adult vaccines may not cover the doctor's costs.
Researchers say one priority is to collect better national information about the patterns of office-based vaccination of adults to pinpoint gaps in practice, which could then be targeted for improvement efforts.
Better guidance should be developed to help health providers effectively promote and administer vaccines, including structured vaccination counseling protocols. Providers also need tools to help them evaluate whether to administer vaccines onsite or refer their patients to community resources such as pharmacies and flu vaccine clinics, according to the study.
Systems also must be developed to credit primary care providers for providing vaccine counseling, whether their patients receive the vaccination on-site or go elsewhere to get it.
INFORMATION:
The study, "A Blueprint for Improving the Promotion and Delivery of Adult Vaccination in the United States," is available at www.rand.org. The study was supported by an unrestricted grant from GlaxoSmithKlein and was conducted by RAND Health in its Program on Public Health Systems and Preparedness.
Other authors of the report are Lori Uscher-Pines, Dr. Soeren Mattke and Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann.
RAND Health, a division of the RAND Corporation, is the nation's largest independent health policy research program, with a broad research portfolio that focuses on health care costs, quality and public health preparedness, among other topics.
END
Similar to the way pavement, softened by a hot sun, will slow down a car, graphene—a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon with wondrous properties—slows down an object sliding across its surface. But stack the sheets and graphene gets more slippery, say theorists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who developed new software to quantify the material's friction.
"I don't think anyone expects graphene to behave like a surface of a three-dimensional material, but our simulation for the first time explains the differences at an atomic scale," says NIST ...
A new clinical Standard Reference Material (SRM) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will help health care professionals more accurately diagnose and treat cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common pathogen that is particularly dangerous for infants and persons with weakened immune systems.
CMV is found in 50 to 80 percent of the population. It is a member of the herpes family of viruses that includes two herpes simplex viruses (the causes of cold sores and genital herpes), the varicella-zoster virus (the cause of chicken pox and shingles) and the Epstein-Barr ...
With a random-looking spatter of paint specks, a pair of cameras and a whole lot of computer processing, engineer Mark Iadicola of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been helping the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), in cooperation with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), to assure the safety of hundreds of truss bridges across the United States. Iadicola has been testing the use of a thoroughly modern version of an old technique—photographic measurement or "photogrammetry"—to watch the failure ...
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has developed two new Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) for measurements of human exposure to environmental toxins. Used as a sort of chemical ruler to check the accuracy of tests and analytic procedures, the new reference materials replace and improve older versions, adding measures for emerging environmental contaminants such as perchlorate, a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has targeted for regulation as a contaminant ...
The chemical industry, which touches 96 percent of all manufactured goods, is seeing some positive signs for 2012, although the overall outlook is not very rosy. Growing demand for chemicals used in agriculture, electronics, cars and airplanes will boost an industry that generates $674 billion in sales in the U.S. alone, but expiring patents and global economic woes will take a toll. These forecasts and others are in the cover story in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific ...
Imagine the following scenarios: a co-worker is spoken to condescendingly, excluded from a meeting, or ignored by a supervisor. How does it make you feel? Do you feel differently depending on whether your co-worker is a man or a woman? According to a new study, workers who witness incivility towards colleagues feel negative emotions – especially when the incivility is aimed at workers of the same sex. The work, by Kathi Miner from Texas A&M University and Angela Eischeid from Buena Vista University, Iowa, is the first to look at the relationship between employees' observations ...
Astronomers using the partially completed ALMA observatory have found compelling evidence for how star-forming galaxies evolve into 'red and dead' elliptical galaxies, catching a large group of galaxies right in the middle of this change.
For years, astronomers have been developing a picture of galaxy evolution in which mergers between spiral galaxies could explain why nearby large elliptical galaxies have so few young stars. The theoretical picture is chaotic and violent: The merging galaxies knock gas and dust into clumps of rapid star formation, called starbursts, ...
A better understanding of the universe will be the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, according to a team of University of Oklahoma researchers. The team predicts the discovery will lead to supersymmetry or SUSY—an extension of the standard model of particle physics. SUSY predicts new matter states or super partners for each matter particle already accounted for in the standard model. SUSY theory provides an important new step to a better understanding of the universe we live in.
Howard Baer, Homer L. Dodge Professor of High Energy Physics in the OU Department ...
Tropical Storm Heidi is forecast to make landfall today along the Pilbara coast of Western Australia as warnings pepper the coast. NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead early in the day and captured a visible image showing Heidi's center still north of the Pilbara coast, while her outer bands continue to bring rainfall and gusty winds to coastal residents.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Heidi on January 11, 2012 at 02:30 UTC (Jan. 10 at 10:30 a.m. EST) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer captured a visible image of the storm. The image showed that ...
Peering deep inside the hub of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a large, rare population of hot, bright stars.
Blue is typically an indicator of hot, young stars. In this case, however, the stellar oddities are aging, sun-like stars that have prematurely cast off their outer layers of material, exposing their extremely blue-hot cores.
Astronomers were surprised when they spotted these stars because physical models show that only an unusual type of old star can be as hot and as bright in ultraviolet light.
While Hubble has ...
