At the start of 2024, Telligen partnered with the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network (CPESN) to tackle a challenge for nursing homes – access to vaccination services. The process of connecting nursing homes in need of vaccines with contracted CPESN pharmacies was an innovative way to work through barriers to vaccine access.
Clinic Implementation and Success
Through one-to-one technical assistance with partners, Telligen quality improvement facilitators identified several barriers to providing vaccine services to nursing home residents. Barriers included vaccine hesitancy and fatigue, COVID-19 outbreaks, misconceptions around vaccination, staffing shortages, lack of staff training, lack of a vaccine champion, billing challenges and access to vaccines. These challenges made increasing immunization rates for nursing home residents difficult, but Telligen approached these challenges with empathy and ingenuity and crafted an idea to provide nursing homes in our region with the support they needed.
Telligen contracted Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network (CPESN) to provide vaccine clinics to nursing homes in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa and Oklahoma. Clinics were promoted during outreach to nursing homes with low up-to-date rates for the COVID-19 vaccines and to departments of public health and nursing home associations within the four states Telligen serves. Vaccines offered included influenza (while in season), COVID-19, pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and others upon request.
To initiate a clinic, nursing homes submitted a request to Telligen in order to be paired with a local CPESN community pharmacy to schedule and complete the vaccine clinic. The first clinics took place in March of 2024 and lasted through August 2024. During that time, 130 vaccine clinics were completed across Colorado, Illinois, Iowa and Oklahoma. Some nursing homes held multiple clinics to provide residents the opportunity to receive up-to-date vaccines. Of the 130 clinics, COVID-19 vaccines were administered at 107 nursing homes. For these nursing homes, 36% were in rural areas and 15% were in areas with a high social vulnerability index (SVI), indicating potential health inequity. In Oklahoma, the impact on social vulnerability was even greater, with 45% of clinics occurring in high SVI areas.
“It was evident through outreach to nursing homes that staff work tirelessly to care for a vulnerable population. Sometimes just they need a partner to come in and lift a burden off their shoulders. Pharmacists were willing and capable to be that partner for vaccination services, and thankfully we had an opportunity to connect them to nursing homes in need through our partnership with CPESN.”
Megan Myers, PharmD, Clinical Pharmacy Specialist at Telligen
Overall, the mean increase in COVID-19 vaccination rates for residents according to National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) data was 20.7%, whereas the mean increase was 28.8% in areas with high SVI. This suggests that access to the vaccine was a bigger barrier in areas with high SVI compared to less vulnerable areas. In total, Telligen is proud to have helped nursing home residents receive 5,663 vaccines through this partnership.
*Influenza vaccine was offered in-season only (March and April).
Continued Support
Telligen continues to assist nursing homes with finding partners for vaccine clinics as part of our ongoing support. Other ways Telligen supports vaccination efforts is by providing education during one-to-one technical assistance on the changes in 2024 respiratory vaccine guidelines from the CDC, helping navigate vaccinating during outbreaks, providing follow up support to assist nursing homes with overcoming barriers to vaccination services and providing support for NHSN reporting. In the months of August and September alone, there were over 500 one-to-one technical assistance encounters from partners related to infection prevention and/or vaccination.
Key resources provided to nursing homes at no cost include the Adult Vaccine Toolkit, vaccine hesitancy talking points for residents and staff, the Immunization Escape Room training on immunization best practices within our Learning Management System, and information on NHSN documentation.
Recognition
Telligen is proud to have been recognized as the 2024 Poster Presentation winner for the Iowa Pharmacy Association Foundation.The award recognizes one original project each year that advances pharmacy practice in Iowa. Posters are judged on originality and innovation, reproducibility, impact on the profession, presentation and methodology. Megan Myers, PharmD, Lindsey Ludwig, RPh, and Madelynn Aeilts, PharmD Candidate 2026, proudly presented a poster titled “Utilizing Quality Improvement Organization Outreach and Community Pharmacies to Improve Nursing Home Vaccination Rates.” This poster outlined the partnership between Telligen and CPESN and its vast impact on providing nursing homes with access to vaccinations.
Telligen was also presented with the Health Equity Champion award at Civitas Networks for Health‘s 2024 Annual Conference for efforts to increase vaccination rates and education at more than 1,000 nursing homes across the country. This award recognizes a single organization that has brought community leaders across sectors and stakeholders together to identify root causes of inequity, developed a plan for addressing those root causes, and identified a sustainability model that incentivizes and motivates the advancement of health equity.