Benefits and Challenges of Sealing Deceased Individual Immunization Records in Immunization Information Systems (IIS): An Overview of Iowa's Process.

Data cleansing practices aimed to improve data quality in immunization information systems (IIS) continue to be identified and evaluated by immunization programs to generate accurate and reliable immunization coverage rates. The Iowa Immunization Program has implemented several automated, daily data cleansing practices to improve the quality of records in Iowa's Immunization Registry Information System (IRIS), including the process of sealing records of deceased individuals through vital records matching. This process removes deceased individual records from the active IIS population, which helps reduce denominator inflation and improve the accuracy of immunization rate calculations.