Metrics

The purpose of these metrics is to evaluate the ability of existing or temptative code systems to serve the purpose of building received vaccines records.

The metrics identified so far are that a code system should be:

• Complete, that is able to represent any administered vaccine. Completeness implies also that code system is:
  • able to represent vaccines administered anywhere in the world.
  • able to represent vaccines administered anytime in the past (historical)
  • able to represent vaccines that are only partially described (non-specific)
• Precise, that is able to discriminate across different vaccines.

Adopting the NUVA ontology as the common transcription for other code systems provides further benefits that are no longer needed to embed within each code system :

• The ability to correlate information bound to other code systems, be it NUVA itself (valences and target diseases), pharmaceutical codes (detailed composition, packaging), logistics codes (stocks and deliveries), or any other (electronic patient leaflet, vaccine information sheets, adverse events following immunization, etc).
• The ability to transcribe to the code system used for any preexisting tool.

Other characteristics relate more to the management of the code system:

• a liberal license
• a managed and efficient maintenance process