SAN FRANCISCO – A new tool will aid doctors in identifying patients eligible for the H1N1 vaccine using criteria published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Doctors using Practice Fusion's free Web-based electronic health record will have access to the public health tool, which has already identified 300,000 First Tier candidates (those who should be first to get the vaccine) in the system for the H1N1 vaccination. Physicians using the platform have access to the data reports to help them order vaccines from state agencies or to direct patients to locations where they can receive them.

"H1N1 flu is a high-profile public health concern this winter in the U.S., and around the world. The World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic, and in the United States, the CDC has marshaled significant resources to respond to this public health crisis. Now the challenge is accurately distributing and administering the vaccine," said Robert Rowley, MD, chief medical officer of Practice Fusion. "Being able to immediately input the CDC's unique criteria into our system and alert the 21,000 users we serve makes this report implementation one of the broadest and most-rapidly deployed biosurveillance efforts to date. It exemplifies the clinical value of EHR for practices of any size."

In order to know how much vaccine to ship to each doctor's office, physicians across the country received questionnaires during the past two weeks from local intermediary organizations asking for patient counts in the five high-risk categories. Officials said without an EHR, generating this list would be a slow, labor intensive, error-prone process for physicians and their staff.

"Getting this report out in a matter of days at a time of national need highlights the intrinsic superiority of a Web-based application over our competitors that need to be installed with on-site, server-based systems," said Ryan Howard, CEO of San Francisco-based Practice Fusion. "The ability to help our doctors immediately and accurately respond to a public-health crisis, without need for 'product upgrades,' is only possible with a Web-based system. We are proud of our ability to help our country face H1N1 flu armed with the powerful tools and technologies Practice Fusion is developing."