1. VAERS Messages Development in HL-7 and Information Capture
Contra Costa County Health Services
Siu Wing Tong, Ph.D.
Information Systems Division
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

2. What is VAERS? Briefly described …
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
Joint effort by
CDC
FDA
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

3. What is VAERS?, Cont’d There is a Published Protocol
For creating the HL-7 messages
CDC’s VAERS document
VAERS messages use ORU message type of HL-7
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

4. First Implementation
Done in summer of 2002 months before the 3rd IRC held in PA
Sample of test messages submitted to CDC
(Susan Abernathy before her retirement from CDC in late 2002)
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

5. Architecture
Use the same “HL-7 Gateway Web Service” architecture to send & receive messages
Presented during the 2nd day HL-7 symposium during the 3rd IRC in PA hosted by Susan Abernathy
4-page description of the gateway published in 3rd IRC available
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

7. Architecture, Cont’d
Free HL-7 parser and message generator, Chameleon, from InterfaceWare of Canada, when participating in Susan Abernathy’s project in
Other commercially available HL-7 parsers such as Neotool are expected to work as well
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

8. Architecture, Cont’d
Cannot embed HL-7 parsers in our new, dot-NET compiled IZ system because neither in-house Neotool nor Chameleon were compatible with dot-NET in 2001
Wrapped in Microsoft web services
Advantages of web services
Web services solved platform incompatibility
Additional flexibility
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

9. VAERS Message Sample
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

10. Susan Abernathy’s Suggestions
We followed
New screen to capture the extra data items on paper form
Store and persist the extra data items
Support additional batch mode of creating HL-7 messages to be sent
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

11. Screen with Reaction Noted
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

12. Contra Costa County Health Services, California

13. Contributors Bhumil Shah Siu Wing Tong
Contra Costa County Health Services, California

14. Contact Us Siu Wing Tong, Ph.D. Information Technology Supervisor
Contra Costa County Health Services
595 Center Ave, Suite 200
Martinez, CA 94553
Contra Costa County Health Services, California