The Purpose of the program is to provide facilitation, consultative, and technical support for the development and/or enhancement of Immunization Information Systems (IIS) standards, practices, and operations. IIS community stakeholders frequently need to have a unified perspective on operational, technical and system-based components to make IIS operational in their federated state. Stakeholders are also beginning to recognize value in developing common approaches to be used in their respective programs, but common development has been hampered by the lack of an effective locus for coordination. This program would enhance the IIS community ability to support these efforts. The announcement is intended to support activities to increase the functional capacity of Immunization Information Systems (IIS) by: • Advancing the development, refinement and/or implementation of community standards, practices, or methodologies dealing with IIS, including interoperability with Electronic Health Records systems and other health information systems. • Providing facilitation services to empower proactive community engagement. • Conducting business analysis, standards support, and development and community documentation of IIS operations. • Providing logistics and travel support for stakeholders and subject matter experts to be brought together for key meetings. • Advancing the development of immunization best practices and recommendations, which can include a variety of IIS operational needs and new efforts, including IIS and Vaccines for Children (VFC) program integration efforts such as Assessment, Feedback, Incentives, and Exchange (AFIX) and vaccine inventory management. • Providing the evaluation support to gather and synthesize feedback from community stakeholders on a wide variety of IIS-related topics and issues. This may involve the creation of short surveys and follow-up efforts and results analysis. • Developing documentation and functional repositories to include catalogs of technical and operational community services. This may include development of joint application approaches; models of provider data sharing agreements; and other related similar data exchange variances, such as documentation of IIS-specific interoperability variances and other entities’ interoperability documents, legislation rules and updates impacting IIS, IIS service catalog, etc. • Providing coordination and project-management services for inter-program joint development efforts to be utilized by one or more public health entity, and serving as the repository for resources so developed. • Providing organizational and communication services (newsletters, webinars, and/or other electronic venues) to the IIS and broader community. Examples include online collaboration sites for committee documentation development and other committee/ workgroup tooling needs. Measurable outcomes of the program will be in alignment with one (or more) of the following performance goal (s) for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD): • Continue to provide funding and technical assistance to the immunization program awardees to develop, enhance, and maintain standards for immunization information systems (IIS) to assure the capability of identifying individuals in need of immunization, measuring vaccination coverage rates, producing reminder and recall notices, and interfacing with electronic health records. • Improve and enhance standardized methods to assess vaccination coverage levels across the lifespan in order to identify groups at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, monitor racial and ethnic disparities in vaccine coverage, evaluate the effectiveness of programs designed to increase coverage levels, monitor uptake of new vaccines, assess differential impact of vaccine shortages, measure performance by various types of providers, and provide greater understanding of socio-demographic and attitudinal factors associated with vaccination. • Support the implementation of standardized systems required for ordering and distributing all public-sector vaccines through the Vaccine Tracking System (VTrckS).