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Vaccine Policy Collaborative Initiative

The Vaccine Policy Collaborative Initiative (VPCI) provides an objective platform for primary care physicians to voice their concerns and experiences with vaccines in their practice. This project allows the physicians’ voice to be heard on a national level with regards to experiences ordering, recommending and administering potential up-and-coming vaccines or vaccines currently recommended by the Center for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). This research is vital in order to help direct vaccination policy at a national level.

The VPCI is nearing its sixth year conducting surveys of physicians around the country about important issues relevant to national immunization policy. It is a unique project that has direct influence on the establishment of US immunization policies and practices.

The VPCI is directed by Dr. Allison Kempe of the Children's Outcomes Research Program at the University of Colorado Denver, and works in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Surveys are conducted each year by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in rapidly designing, conducting and analyzing surveys. The Initiative employs a rapid turnaround survey method with a national network of physicians (indentified as sentinel site networks).

Currently, three sentinel site networks are up and running in pediatrics, family medicine and general internal medicine specialties. Physicians were randomly recruited from around the country using the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and American College of Physicians (ACP) membership files. These networks are designed to represent four geographic regions (Northeast, Midwest, South and West), three practice settings (urban inner city, suburban and rural) and three practice types (private, public or hospital-based clinic, and HMO). Each network includes approximately 425 physicians. To establish comparability to these three sentinel sites, the study team also administered surveys to random samples of physicians in each primary care specialty recruited from the American Medical Association (AMA).

Three geographically diverse advisory committees from each primary care setting guide the study team with each survey. The function of the advisory committees is to advise the investigators with regard to policy-relevant issues, discuss optimal ways to access providers, and are used to pilot survey questions and methods.

Our work has been presented every year at National Meetings including the PAS, NIC, and SGIM. Additionally, 7 of these abstracts have been presented at the ACIP annual meetings.

 

 
Publications
Surveys Completed or in the Field