Table of Contents
Vision
Vaccines are the second most impactful public health intervention, following clean water. They have saved countless lives and allowed children to grow into healthy adults. Vaccines facilitate international cooperation and ensure safe travel, underpinning our global economy. Accurate vaccine coding is crucial to maintaining this trust.
Currently, there is no organization that vaccine code experts can call to get answers on how other countries are coding their vaccines. For example, during the pandemic, questions arose about what vaccinations were being administered in different countries and how they were being coded. Countries struggled to add concepts to correctly represent “foreign” vaccines due to a lack of information on their coding. While some individuals have partial knowledge about other countries' vaccination practices, there is no efficient, centralized place for vaccine experts to pose questions and get technical information on coding.
Policy and program leaders often assume that developing and deploying new vaccinations is challenging, which is true, but they also believe that technical people automatically understand how to code them properly and can easily grasp concepts from other countries. This is a misconception. A significant amount of time and energy is devoted to getting vaccinations into people, but very little thought is given to supporting the technologists who work to ensure these vaccinations are recorded accurately.
Our project aims to fill this gap by providing a support network for vaccine code set experts, enhancing our global response to future pandemics, and ensuring that accurate vaccine coding supports the broader goals of public health.
Objective
The International Vaccine Codes Initiative seeks to create a global network of vaccine code custodians and experts. This community of practice will transcend national borders to support and advocate for the immunization community. Our goals include maintaining the Unified Nomenclature of Vaccines (NUVA) code system, mapping it to common code sets, and establishing metrics and standards for national and international vaccine code sets.
This effort is not intended to replace or change how vaccinations are coded today but rather to help improve them by developing a comprehensive mapping system that allows different vaccine code sets to interoperate seamlessly. Additionally, we aim to enhance the professional development of vaccine code experts, providing a peer group that is critical for ensuring accuracy and confidence in their work.
Scope
This effort is scoped around supporting the recording of a complete immunization history for any patient who received a vaccination at any time and in any country. The recording needs to be accurate enough to determine what disease the patient is protected against and what additional vaccinations they may need and when. This focus differentiates our work from tracking vaccination products and ensuring proper administration. Pharmacological product codes have more detail than needed for patient history and address logistics and oversight of vaccination programs, which are beyond our scope.
We focus on coding to ensure individual and community protection from diseases. For example, most pharmacological products are relevant on a patient's record only in the near term, typically less than three months. An aspirin given for a headache is not significant on a patient record after a few days, whereas an immunization event remains relevant for decades. Our group is dedicated to this long-term view unique to immunizations, excluding broader medical product issues. We also avoid policy discussions, particularly about which vaccine code sets to use. While we provide resources to assess vaccine code systems, the choice of which to use is a local decision based on purpose. Discussions on specific software systems or solutions are also outside our scope.
In Scope:
- Vaccine code set management
- National and universal code sets
- Technical and detailed level codes
- Lifetime vaccination records
- Emergency and clinical trial vaccinations
Close, But Not in Scope:
- Medication supply
- Inventory
- Pharmacovigilance
Out of Scope:
- Policy discussions
- Code set selection
- Software and systems
Primary Mission
The primary mission of this group is to provide a centralized place where vaccine code information can be collected and vaccine code experts can find answers to their questions. Questions that this group cannot answer can then be refined by the group and helpfully articulated to those organizations that could provide the answers. Our policy and program leaders assume their technical teams know this information, but we won't know it unless we create an organization to collect and provide this information. Beyond this overall community of practice knowledge sharing, we also want to provide technical tools that can help the experts in their day-to-day jobs.
The primary technical item will be the maintenance of the NUVA code system, which will hold all the knowledge about vaccinations, including what they contain and what diseases they prevent. These will be mapped to code systems the experts use, showing where gaps exist in the local system, and helping NUVA to capture new vaccination concepts it does not contain. Finally, we will be able to provide metrics for code systems, as part of the mapping output, to indicate the capabilities of the code system to support immunization histories. These can be used by policy and operational leadership to make decisions on how to use code sets and what improvements they may want to ask for.
In summary:
- Network of Experts: Provide peer support in a community of practice.
- Advocacy: Advocate for code system improvements to accurately record immunization histories.
- Technical Support: Maintain NUVA, map code systems to/from NUVA, and develop metrics and standards for vaccine code sets.
Call to Action: Join Us
We invite vaccine code set experts worldwide to join our monthly calls. Your participation will help us gather valuable information, build technical infrastructure, and advocate for improvements in universal code systems. Together, we can support routine vaccinations, maintain accurate lifetime records, and ensure seamless cross-border data transmission.
Become part of the International Vaccine Codes Initiative to help shape the future of vaccine coding and improve global public health. Your expertise and collaboration are essential to our success.
Please email us for more information and to get involved. Check out and share our one-page overview with leadership or other interested colleagues.