Meredith Rutland
Technical Writer
SpinSys

Introduction

With the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, expedited vaccine delivery was necessary within the Department of Defense (DoD). They were obligated to provide vaccines to an expanded population of over 10 million people. With the administration of such a large number of vaccines, the DoD needed to develop a reporting system to transmit daily vaccine dose administration data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Advana. With the largest operating budget in the world, the DoD needed a unified view of their data which flows from many external systems and sources.

The SpinSys team, under the Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 contract for Medical Data Services (MDS) has created the has created and migrated the Pandemic Registry onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). This work builds upon the support they are currently providing for COVID-19 data collection, processing, and reporting, and will include the creation of a data repository within the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Amazon Redshift cluster that ingests patient encounters, labs, immunizations, demographics and other (as needed) specified data related to Pandemic Events from several disparate data sources.

The Pandemic Registry will be used by Military Health System (MHS) leadership, MHS Information Platform (MIP) users, MIP applications and external customers for research, analysis, and evaluation to improve outcomes for patient care during current and future pandemic events.

WRK_Pandemic is a database that receives data from millions of patients at various vaccination sites and organizes, validates, and stores it into one location. Talend is an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool for data integration and management which copies data from multiple sources, in this instance the data that is ingested, is managed by Talend. Through Talend, the Covid Vax Team with SpinSys does an analysis on the data, runs filters and goes through the refusals and duplicates. The data is stored within COVID-19 Vaccination Reporting Specification (CVRS) once validated. 

Each afternoon, the data is transferred to Advana and the CDC. Advana is an interoperability platform for data and analytics that is used by the DoD. Advana receives this data for the Defense Health Agency (DHA). The CDC receives their daily report through CVRS. CDC now has an accurate report of DoD vaccination status which is published on their website. This allows the ability to quickly and accurately view the total DoD vaccine doses administered through the CDC website.

Conclusion

As of today, over 6 million Covid-19 vaccine doses (as of October 2021) have been administered within the DoD, self reporting is no longer required, and the data is quickly transmitted and reported. In the near future, this daily data delivery will become automated.