Examining Adolescent Assessment, Feedback, Incentive, and Exchange (AFIX) in North Carolina

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill91 enrolled

Overview

The North Carolina Immunization Branch will evaluate the use of the CDC program to improve adolescent vaccination practices (called Assessment, Feedback, Incentives, and eXchanges, or AFIX). This evaluation is the first of its kind in the nation and may have a profound impact on prevention. AFIX has four major components: 1) Assessment of a provider's current immunization practices and vaccination levels, 2) Feedback of the assessment results and strategies to improve coverage levels, 3) Incentives to improve coverage levels, and 4) eXchange of information and resources necessary to facilitate improvement. This program will evaluate the effectiveness of AFIX visits on affecting provider practices to increase adolescent (age 11-18) immunization. Visits include discussion of that practice's immunization rates and strategies for improving rates. The investigators will compare the changes, from baseline to 5 months, in immunization for practices receiving virtual visits (webinars), in-person visits, and no visits (control group). Thirty practices will be randomly assigned to each intervention type. The main outcomes of this study are practice-wide uptake rates of several adolescent vaccines (Tdap, HPV, and MCV4) as well as pre- and post-AFIX visit surveys focusing on recall tactics utilized by each practice. Data will be collected on practices with at least 200 adolescent patients (note: there is no patient-level data collected in this study).

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

NONE

Enrollment

Conditions

Adolescent Health Services

Interventions

Assessment , Feedback, Incentives, and eXchange ProgramOTHER

The NC Immunization Branch uses Adolescent AFIX (Assessment, Feedback, Incentives and eXchange) Program, a quality improvement strategy developed by the CDC to improve the immunization practices and vaccination coverage levels of public and private health care providers. It has four main components: 1) Assessment of a provider's current immunization practices and vaccination levels, 2) Feedback of the assessment results and strategies to improve coverage levels, 3) Incentives to improve coverage levels, and 4) eXchange of information and resources necessary to facilitate improvement.

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Change in Vaccination Rate: HPV vaccine initiation among 11-12 year olds

We will gather practice-specific rates of coverage for adolescents (age 11-12) for the first dose of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine at baseline and 5 months follow-up.