Facing Flu Crisis, CDC Sped Development Of System To Allocate VaccinesFacing Flu Crisis, CDC Sped Development Of System To Allocate Vaccines

When contamination of flu vaccine from a major European supplier, Chiron Corp., last fall resulted in a shortfall of nearly 50 million doses for the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention needed to react quickly.

An important piece of the CDC's response was figuring out how to redeploy shipments of vaccine from a second supplier, Sanofi Pasteur MSD (formerly Aventis Pasteur), to U.S. states and cities that had the worst shortages--places where shipments had been expected to come predominately, and in some cases exclusively, from Chiron.

To tackle the crisis, CDC accelerated development of software that had been part of a broader, multiyear IT project dubbed the "counter-measure response system."

Specifically, it ramped up development of "flu vaccine-finder" applications, which helped the CDC, U.S. public-health departments, and vaccine maker Sanofi Pasteur and its distributors find where there were inventories of flu vaccine, where there were shortages, and help reapportion shipments to where they were most needed.

"Like many processes in health care, this [work] had been more manual--this is a significant step to real-time capacity management for public-health crises," says Dr. John Loonsk, the CDC's associate director for informatics.

Normally, vaccines are produced and delivered directly to the customers who order them, Loonsk says. But because Chiron couldn't fulfill orders for millions of doses of vaccine, the CDC needed to "proactively apportion vaccine in the supply chain to better address the needs," he says. The development of flu vaccine takes months, so a manufacturer has a very limited ability to ramp up huge, unexpected volumes of vaccine quickly in time for the influenza season.

Sanofi Pasteur supplied the CDC with inventory and supply-chain data about its flu vaccine being manufactured and planned for shipment. Through a CDC Web site, state and local public-health officials can access information about supplies of the vaccine and to place their orders so that shipments could be allocated by need, Loonsk says.

The new flu applications are part of the CDC's ongoing work to automate and optimize public-health processes, Loonsk says. The systems used to help tackle the flu shortage are also being broadened to help manage other public-health crises, including naturally occurring diseases or bioterrorism, he says.

In addition to helping reallocate vaccine, Loonsk says, these systems will help the CDC and public-health official manage supplies of treatments and preventative drugs, as well as identify "isolation needs" for future health crises.