Hello, I'm really pleased to present the CMSS Project Specialty Societies Advancing Adult Immunization in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I am Dr. Helen Burstyn, the Chief Executive Officer of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, and I look forward to sharing more information with you about CMSS and this important project. CMSS is a coalition of more than 50 specialty societies representing more than 800,000 physicians across all of medicine. We work to share expertise and collective voice across specialties to support physicians, really importantly, and the patients they serve. A bit about the Specialty Societies Advancing Immunization Project. This is a five-year cooperative agreement between CDC and CMSS to promote vaccination for high-risk patients in specialty settings. Seven specialty society partners are working with us closely, and they are focused on patients with chronic illnesses, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and chronic kidney disease, as well as older adults and patients cared for in occupational health settings, and the logos of our seven partners are represented below. This project advances adult immunization practice in specialty societies in two important ways. First, we engage health systems to test interventions in specialty settings to improve practices related to vaccination, assessment, recommendation, administration, referral, and documentation. And we've been working with our specialty society partners to align their educational offerings, policies, and guidelines to CDC standards for adult immunization practice, which are outlined on this slide. These long-standing standards have made the case that all clinicians, whether you're a primary care or specialty provider, can make a difference by ensuring that you are part of the team that asks patients whether they're vaccinated, recommend that they get vaccinated, and even if you can't vaccinate in your own clinical setting, you'll refer them and document that you have referred them on for vaccination. This has to be a team effort. The reliance, particularly as we saw during the recent pandemic, would suggest we can only succeed when we get all hands on deck to ensuring that patients are really fully aware of and engaged in their efforts to stay fully vaccinated against vaccine-preventable illnesses. We're really pleased that our seven health systems have brought forward 45 health systems who are participating in this project, and you can see the logos listed here of the various health systems. The criteria that we used to help select those health systems included their capacity to collect and report data on immunization, specifically focus on those high-risk patient populations we talked about earlier, and have a diversity of patient mix from academic settings to occupational health settings to safety net settings. We really want to try to learn as much as possible about what QI interventions work to engage specialists across a wide variety of health systems and health settings. Participating health systems have worked to tailor the focus of their intervention. Initially, all of our participating health systems are focused on improving vaccine rates for influenza and COVID-19. As we move forward in this project in our third year, health systems can also choose to focus on other vaccinations that are important for adults, particularly those who have chronic illnesses, including hepatitis B, pneumococcal, RSV, shingles, and tetanus. We've been collecting examples of health system quality improvement interventions that are already demonstrating some benefits in terms of improving adult vaccination. For example, we've seen efforts to improve documentation of vaccine status in patients' electronic health records, helping to assess and then change workflows to make sure that we can assess vaccine status and administer vaccines, training clinicians and staff on techniques to respectfully engage with patients who may be vaccine-hesitant, and then finally educating patients about the benefits and the risks of vaccines. These health system quality improvement interventions generate on-the-ground learning about how to adopt the standards for adult immunization practice into specialty settings. Those 45 health systems are actively testing strategies to improve vaccination rates, and our seven partner specialties are working with us to scan for learning, innovations, and best practices. We will ultimately work to synthesize and disseminate those learnings and best practices across a wider array of both primary care and specialty practices and specialties within CMSS. We're really excited that, as part of this effort, we have launched the CMSS Learning Center, which this video will be part of. Participating societies have developed new and updated educational materials that reflect what we're learning from participating practices' experience in terms of key challenges. Educational resources are available in an array of formats for both clinicians and patients, and the CMSS Learning Center contains an online repository of educational materials on immunization. Some featured resources, for example, on vaccine hesitancy. We've been working with Professor Julia Minson at the Harvard Kennedy School, who has an incredible body of work on a concept called conversational receptiveness, and she is creating a Disagreeing Better Toolkit for clinicians and care teams. This will allow clinicians to better understand how to counter patient concerns, have an open dialogue, have open lines of communication to help those who are vaccine hesitant. This new e-learning course, which will have available CME credit, will support clinicians in having those discussions, and we're really excited that that will be available shortly on the CMSS Learning Center. Finally, just thank you for your attention. Thank you for all we're doing collectively by working together to make healthcare better together. Thank you.

Helen Burstin

Dr. Helen Burstin

Vaccination

SSAAI

Healthcare

CDC

COVID

Medical Specialty

Societies

Adult Immunization

CMSS Project Specialty Societies Advancing Adult Immunization

CDC collaboration

physicians

vaccinations

quality improvement interventions

CMSS

Hepatis B

Pneumococcal

RSV

Shingles

Tetanus

Workflow

Assessment

Training

Education

Patients

Patients First

Documentation

Vaccines

Vaccine Hesitancy