The Ultimate Guide to Automatic Vaccine Inventory Management

Accurate ordering paired with automatic vaccine inventory management is essential for maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of vaccination programs. It helps ensure continuity of care for patients, minimizes vaccine wastage, and allows practices to respond effectively to changing demand patterns and public health needs.

Accurate Vaccine Ordering & Management…

• Ensures your practice has an adequate supply on hand.
  Running out of vaccines can disrupt patient care and may result in missed vaccination opportunities, compromising public health efforts and eroding patient trust.

• Helps prevent vaccine wastage.
  Vaccines have specific storage and handling requirements, and ordering excessive amounts can lead to vaccines expiring before they can be used—a financial loss for your practice and a potential contributor to vaccine shortages on a larger scale.
• Allows you to better anticipate and react to fluctuations in demand.
  By forecasting demand (including the new respiratory season realities) and adjusting orders accordingly, practices can ensure they’re always prepared to serve their community.

Introducing a vaccine manager to your team can also greatly enhance the effectiveness of managing vaccine orders and returns in your primary care practice. While the greater focus of this guide is focused on the benefits of VaxCare’s automated suite of tools having a vaccine manager in place can provide additional support, expertise, and peace of mind for your practice. They can help ensure that your vaccine program runs smoothly and efficiently, ultimately benefiting both your staff and your patients.

Benefits of Automatic Vaccine Ordering & Management

Automatic vaccine ordering and management tools streamline the vaccination process and enable better healthcare outcomes. These specialized systems automate and optimize the tasks in your practice’s vaccine management plan (e.g. inventory tracking, patient outreach, secure, efficient, and equitable vaccine administration, etc.)

• Greater Inventory Accuracy
  Automatic vaccine management simplifies and optimizes the vaccine ordering process and helps healthcare facilities minimize financial losses due to expired or unused vaccines, leading to precise inventory control with fewer financial losses due to expired or unused vaccines.
• Streamlined Workflows
  Automating back-end clinical processes and supply-chain management, liberating healthcare workers from time-consuming administrative tasks, allowing them to dedicate more effort to patient care—important for combating burnout as noted by the U.S. Surgeon General ^[1].
• Enhanced Patient Safety
  Ensuring patient well-being is vital during vaccine administration. Automatic vaccine management helps to prevent errors and improve safety.
• Improved Vaccination Rates
  Automatic vaccine management streamlines the secure storage, distribution, and tracking of doses to ensure their safety and efficacy.
• Minimize Waste
  Utilizing a system like VaxCare means your practice’s projected needs and historical usage patterns are analyzed to find your inventory sweet spot—typically 3-4 weeks by vaccine.

By enhancing data accuracy, simplifying administrative workflows, and providing comprehensive analytics, automatic vaccine ordering and management helps healthcare providers and public health administrators increase vaccination rates and create healthier communities.

Simplify Workflows with Automated Vaccine Ordering & Management

With automated systems constantly monitoring vaccine stock levels and providing real-time visibility, staff members will spend dramatically less time manually counting and tracking inventory. Suggested order quantities can also be generated based on historical usage and current demand, further reducing the time spent on decision-making for reorders.

For example, having the tools available to easily separate Vaccines for Children ^[2] (VFC) doses from private inventory can significantly improve efficiency. Automation can help in tracking and maintaining separate inventories—ensuring that VFC vaccines are accurately accounted for and utilized for eligible patients, eliminating confusion helping to maintain compliance.

By automating tedious manual processes—which can come to dominate the traditional vaccination workflow—staff members can focus more on what’s most important… providing excellent patient care.

Automatic Vaccine Ordering with Real-Time Inventory

We take care of your vaccine supply automatically for seamless continuity of care.

• VaxCare replenishes your vaccine stock automatically.
  With VaxCare, you never have to worry about what’s in your fridge—or, just as importantly, what’s not. Our smart data tools help your vaccine manager keep track of everything that goes in and out, and automatically replenishes your vaccine supplies, ensuring a continuous 3-4 week supply, at no cost to you.
• How does automatic vaccine ordering work?
  It starts with VaxCare purchasing all of your vaccines. When we say you’ll never pay another vaccine manufacturer’s invoice again, we mean it. We buy up your existing inventory and do all of your vaccine purchasing going forward, providing you with unlimited inventory, without costing you a dime.Our platform returns tens of thousands of dollars in capital to the average practice (not to mention peace of mind), which means never again having to pull out your own credit card to pay a vaccine invoice.

• Automatic Vaccine Ordering, But Still The Provider’s Choice
  Have a preference for a particular manufacturer, or just looking for a one-off vaccine?  Not a problem. We maintain relationships with all of the major vaccine manufacturers, ensuring that our partners have the best supply available. VaxCare is one of the top 10 buyers of vaccines nationally, alongside CVS, Walgreens, and the U.S. government.VaxCare partners wishing to make a new or revised vaccine selection after enrollment can simply reach out to our customer care team at any time.
• Automatic Replenishment Thresholds
  Our platform makes sure that vaccines are replenished automatically when inventory gets low, keeping your vaccine fridge stocked with a 3–4 week supply at all times.
• Placing and Reviewing Special Orders
  Need even more control? Placing a special order is a cinch for partners looking to set up a vaccination event through the VaxCare Portal—the web-based companion to the VaxCare Hub that captures patient scheduling, insurance information, and eligibility.
• Real-time Vaccine Inventory Monitoring
  Even for a single clinic location, real-time monitoring of inventory through a vaccine management system offers substantial benefits; offering optimized suggestions and enabling practices to make informed decisions with minimal intervention.Real-time monitoring contributes to a streamlined workflow, making the clinic more responsive, efficient, and adaptable, while preventing runouts, optimizing vaccine distribution, minimizing expiration risks, and ultimately enhancing the patient experience

Effortless Vaccine Returns

Expired or unused doses? No problem. We handle the return process, saving you time and money.

With VaxCare, expired doses are returned at no cost and lost doses are easy to reconcile. Using a single barcode scan, our technology balances your inventory, updates the patient’s record in your EHR, and handles the claims process from start to finish. 

That said, despite the ease of returning doses, it should go without saying that we do everything in our power to make sure our partnered practices don’t waste time dealing with returns. But sometimes the unexpected or unavoidable happens, like with the ice storm that slammed into Texas a few years back, disrupting regular life for millions, and plunging much of the state into darkness for days.

And for physicians, the problem wasn’t just an average power outage; entire inventories of vaccines were on the line, underscoring the importance of reliable cold chain management.

As others grappled with insurance claims, paperwork, and prolonged delays, those partnered with VaxCare experienced a hassle-free resolution, receiving replacement vaccines in as little as 48 hours, and at no additional cost.

Cold Chain Management

Vaccines have specific storage temperature requirements. Doses that have been outside the recommended range for too long must be discarded. Document the incident for your records.

Best practices for maintaining the cold chain in healthcare settings, as outlined in the WHO Vaccine Management Handbook ^[3], include:

1. Implementing Efficient Inventory Management
   Utilizing advanced vaccine management systems that track vaccine inventories with precision and provide dose-level access, thus minimizing waste and optimizing stock levels.
2. Maintaining Compliance
   Implementing automated systems that simplify reporting and compliance with CDC and VFC guidelines ^[4] for temperature logs and inventory reports.

Automate Your Vaccine Ordering with VaxCare

The Vaccine Program for Modern Practices

Ordering vaccines is a straightforward task. And counting your inventory is easy. However, the complexities of vaccine management aren’t found in isolated tasks, but in performing all of them quickly enough to avoid wasting time, and accurately enough to avoid coming up short (or finding your fridge full at the end of the season).

That’s why we created this guide. To cover all the details of our comprehensive vaccine management solution, designed to address and simplify every aspect of your vaccine program. Because you didn’t get into this business to manage inventory, you did it to provide care.

Vaccine Management Made Easy

• Automatic Shipments: Never run low again. We take care of reorder thresholds for seamless continuity of care.
• Real-time Inventory: A clear, up-to-date picture of your vaccine stock, minimizes time spent on physical checks.
• Effortless Returns: Expired or unused doses? No problem. We handle the return process, saving you time and money.

Our integrated platform is designed to simplify the process for you. By streamlining vaccine management, we can help you save time and money, while still allowing you to provide the best care possible to your patients. When you’re ready to take your vaccine management to the next level, our platform is here to help.

References
[1] (2024, April 16). Vaccines for Children (CDC). https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/index.html
[2] (2024, April 16). Health Worker Burnout (HHS). https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/health-worker-burnout/index.html
[3] (2024, April 16). Vaccine Management Handbook (WHO). https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-IVB-15.04
[4] (2024, April 16). Vaccine Storage and Handling Resources (CDC). https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/admin/storage/index.html

Additional Resources
For more information on vaccine management and healthcare compliance, including best practices, training opportunities, and relevant updates on immunization programs, we recommend:

World Health Organization (WHO): https://www.who.int/immunization/diseases/en/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/
Immunize.org: https://www.immunize.org/