TOPEKA – Governor Laura Kelly today announced new steps to address data reporting issues that to date have inaccurately identified the number of individuals vaccinated for COVID-19 in Kansas. To address this gap, the State will be implementing a series of policies – in partnership with enrolled health care providers — to help solve the vaccine administration gap, beginning next week.
Reported vaccine administration rates in Kansas have been lower than expected, despite qualitative reports of vaccines being administered quickly by health care providers. The gap in reporting is due to reporting inconsistencies and time lags between the state’s immunization registry (KS WebIZ) and the federal registry (CDC Vaccine Finder).
“We want Kansans to have confidence that we are vaccinating at-risk Kansans as quickly as possible, and despite data lags, health care providers are administering all doses of vaccine to those who need them most,” Governor Laura Kelly said. “To fix these issues, we are working with local health departments and providers to urgently address the problem. The new processes we are implementing will allow us to spend more time and energy on getting vaccines in Kansans’ arms.”
The Kelly administration is implementing three processes to address the vaccine administration “gap”:
1) Introducing a new daily reporting snapshot for vaccine providers who have received or administered doses to report aggregate and a daily snapshot of their top-line data. This will provide a much-needed accurate daily picture of our progress getting vaccines to Kansans and allow for targeted resolution of reporting or administration issues impacting the state overall.
2) Improving existing reporting, by requiring a flat file fix (a templated excel file) of administration data to be submitted for providers with known reporting issues in WebIZ. This will help ensure more complete data is reported in Kansas and will help to directly correct reported CDC numbers to reflect reality.
3) Addressing underlying technical issues with a system-level solve, addressing the underlying system and data transfer issues between provider systems, WebIZ and the CDC.
Starting Monday providers will be required to report data daily on doses received, administered, in inventory and transferred via the daily snapshot. This information will give the Kansas Department of Health and Environment a clear view of where vaccines are being administered and will help surface reporting issues in KSWebIZ so they can be addressed. Providers with identified reporting issues will be required to submit patient-level information to KSWebIZ and KDHE via flat files to reduce errors and account for doses that have been delivered but have not yet been reported as administered or in inventory.
All three actions aim to address the gap in administration data between what we see in state and local sources and progress providers are making vaccinating Kansans. In tandem, the Kelly administration is working with the KSWebIZ vendor to identify and resolve the long-term data issues.