Pfizer Joins With The American College of Physicians To Immunize Adults
By Cyndi Root
Pfizer announced in a press release that it has joined with the American College of Physicians (ACP) and CECity to raise the rates of immunized adults.
The three entities announced the new initiative at the annual National Adult Influenza and Immunization Summit meeting in Atlanta, GA. Pfizer will fund the program and provide experience and resources for the collaboration, expected to begin in two states before deploying nationwide. CECity will provide its MedConcert portal, a cloud-based performance improvement platform.
Dr. Robert Centor, Chair of ACP’s Board of Regents and a practicing internist, said, “As a national organization of internists, ACP’s internal medicine physician specialists and their practice teams play a critical role in increasing adult immunization rates.”
Pfizer, ACP, CECity Initiative
The new initiative’s goal is to meet the National Vaccine Advisory Committee’s standards for adult immunization. Those standards are designed to take advantage of the power of the physician’s office, as research shows that vaccination rates are highest when a physician initiates a conversation with the patient about vaccines. The standards call for doctors to evaluate the patient’s vaccine status, recommend vaccines, administer and document vaccines, or refer the patient for a vaccine.
Currently in the U.S., only 70 percent of adults have the recommended vaccines, and the figures are lower for minorities. While electronic health records (EHR) have improved vaccination rates and multiple local, state, and federal programs have encouraged vaccines, Pfizer says that most physicians do not have the information and resources they need to increase vaccinations.
The new program seeks to engage health providers by providing them access to the
ACP’s Adult Immunization Registry. The registry is available through CECity’s MedConcert web portal, a cloud platform that mediates physician data exchange. Dr. Bernard Rosof, CEO of the QHC Advisory Group and Dr. William Schaffner, Immediate Past-President of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, will co-chair the national advisory committee for the initiative.
The American College of Physicians
The American College of Physicians (ACP) is the second-largest physician group in the United States comprising 137,000 internal medicine physicians and medical students. It publishes updated vaccine recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), along with additional prescribing information for physicians based on prior vaccinations and the patient’s history. The ACIP usually approves the Adult Immunization Schedule in autumn for the following year.