The Department of Health is looking to implement a new digital health records system to better track things like vaccination records.
This comes after an outbreak of measles in the Saint John area, where the lack of an electronic database make things difficult.
Dr. Jennifer Russell, chief medical officer of health for the province, say they are rolling out the system in three phases.
“The public health information solution is a digital program that has three modules that we will be adopting and one has already been adopted, and that’s the first one which is the inventory registry, so we can track vaccines, we can order new vaccines,” she said.
Phase two and three include a vaccine registry, and an outbreak management system.
Russell says tracking vaccines allows them to order more in a quicker time frame that wasn’t possible before.
“We can also track the vaccines around the province. let’s say at the end of the flu season, we will know how many vaccines were distributed, and we’ll know how many were brought back into the system and we can track those as well, so that’ll eliminate wastage,” she said.
When a similar system for ordering and tracking vaccines was implemented in Nova Scotia, they saw annual wastage drop from 10 per cent to two per cent.
Russell says the system will also house health records, to help track who has gotten certain vaccines.
They are rolling out the record system over the next two years.
