On October 13, the VACs team visited Lincoln Community Health, one of the Education and Technical Assistance pilots in the VACs project. Dorothea Brock serves as the FQHC’s Primary Care Manager and has been focusing heavily on relationship building with Lincoln for about a year, meeting with them in person multiple times per month and going the extra mile to stay in communication. Her hard work has paid off! Lincoln staff see Dorothea as a valuable resource and include her on their QI teams. The positive relationship she has created with Lincoln has even motivated staff to create a QI team that focuses solely on HPV as well as having a HPV Physician Champion at the director level.
Lincoln is one of the 10 sites which receive no funding from the VACs Project, however they’ve done a tremendous amount of work in this project to increase their capacity! Modifying their EHR function and manually cleaning up 1400 individual records in the NC Immunization Registry has allowed them to determine a solid HPV vaccination baseline. Before cleaning their data, initiation rates were low at 43%, but after cleaning up the data, the rates rose to 73% - a great success!
Now that they have good data from which to work, Lincoln is implementing a reminder/recall process and promoting HPV vaccination using CDC materials both internally and externally. These improvements will benefit not only HPV vaccination, but create long-term systems change for all vaccination at Lincoln. We can’t wait to see what Lincoln does next!

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