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Department of Health and Human Services
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention


Vaccines & Immunizations

Programs & Tools:

National Immunization Survey-IIS Study

Immunization information systems (IIS) can serve as an important tool for measuring vaccination coverage levels. However, the best source of data on vaccinations among young U.S. children is still the National Immunization Survey (NIS). The NIS uses random-digit-dialing to find a sample of households with children 19-35 months of age. The NIS draws a separate sample for each calendar quarter and completes interviews with household respondents for about 32,000 children each year. With the consent of parents or guardians, the NIS also contacts the children's immunization providers (by mail) to request a complete vaccination history from the child's medical records.

In order to measure the data completeness of IIS and better understand how IIS data can add to the provider data collected from the NIS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began the NIS-IIS Query Pretest in 2002. Using IIS in this way may reduce respondent burden on providers, lower the cost of the NIS, increase participation in and use of IIS, and improve the quality of efforts to monitor vaccination coverage.

To conduct this pretest, the CDC added a few questions to the NIS household interview, to obtain permission to contact state IIS in order to collect immunization histories. Information received from the state IIS was compared to immunization data obtained from immunization providers. Estimates of vaccination coverage were produced from NIS data and from IIS data.

The pretest was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 included one quarter of data from Arizona (Quarter 3 of 2002), and one quarter of data from the District of Columbia, Michigan, and Oklahoma (Quarter 4 2002). Phase 2 began in 2004 and included two quarters of data from Mississippi, North Dakota, and South Dakota (Quarters 3 and 4 2004) and one quarter of data from Wisconsin (Quarter 4 2004). These IIS were chosen for the pretest because they have mature databases and over 75% of immunization providers participating.

Please click on the links below to see some results from Phase 1. Phase 2 data collection is on-going and results will be posted when they become available.

This page last modified on September 7, 2005
Content last reviewed on September 7, 2005
Content Source: National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases

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Vaccines and Immunizations