Metrics:Precise

Facilitates specificity to determine whether a patient has had the requisite vaccinations for disease protection and, if not, which exact vaccinations are needed to achieve immunity.

Encoded vaccines can be characterised as concrete, when they correspond exactly to a given product, or abstract, when they represent a class of products with similar characteristics. Vaccine code systems may contain only concrete codes (such as pharmaceutical code systems), both concrete and abstract codes (CVC, NUVA), or only abstract codes (SNOMED-CT, ATC).

Precision ensures individuals receive the necessary vaccines for full protection.

Code systems including concrete codes are unambiguous. If the product can be identified, it can be codified. For code systems containing only abstract codes, we estimate the level of ambiguity as the average number of concrete vaccines within a class (evaluated against the codes for concrete vaccines present in NUVA ). Unambiguousness is computed as 100 divided by this number.

FK - If we consider NUVA as the most comprehensive list of possible vaccine records, precision is characterized by the ability to distinguish between NUVA concepts. For each NUVA concept (within the codeable ones, see completeness), there is at least one code in the code system that matches with a minimum set of NUVA concepts. If this set is reduced to 1, then the concept designation is absolutely precise. We can then build a distribution of the number of NUVA concepts per size of their most precise designation, and use it to elaborate the precision index for the whole code system as the weighted average of these sizes.