Australian Immunisation Handbook Calculator

The National Immunisation Catch-up Calculator generates vaccination schedules based on a number of factors, including age, location, medical at-risk conditions and previous vaccination history. Morpht built an interactive application which helps health professional generate schedules based on many complex rules across a number of different cohorts.

Overview

Drupal 10 | GovCMS Convivial | Web development | JavaScript development

The National Immunisation Catch-up Calculator is a powerful tool designed to allow healthcare practitioners to manage a child’s immunisation regime. It has been implemented as an extension to the Australian Immunisation Handbook. Morpht has worked on this project with the assistance of Folk, a Sydney-based Strategic Design Consultancy, who championed the complex tasks of UX and stakeholder management.

The calculator is built as a standalone Web App using Drupal concepts to structure data in Javascript libraries.

The app allows entry of numerous details including age, location, any medically at-risk conditions and any previous vaccination history, including any vaccinations received overseas. These details are then used in the complex business logic provided by the Immunisation Handbook to produce a recommendation for further vaccinations appropriate for that child. This has been recently expanded to all multiple at-risk conditions to be factored into the calculations and recommendations.

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Key statistics

Antigens

Vaccines

Rules

391

Behavioural tests

The challenge

The child’s health and well-being are paramount hence the business logic must use all relevant criteria to provide accurate recommendations.Care and attention needs to be applied to the business logic and the rules which drive the calculator recommendations. The business rules used to calculate future vaccinations are revised regularly as new information and recommendations become available. As a result, the calculator must have the flexibility to support regular updates whilst providing accurate recommendations.

Over the last three years the calculator has been extended with many new features, ensring that it is adaptable and continuously improving. For example, the latest released major feature allows for medical professionals to generate recommended schedules for children with multiple medically at-risk conditions.

The solution

Users have the ability to add any details that are relevant to generating recommended catch-up schedules. This includes the individuals’s age, location, previous vaccination history and a wide range of medical at-risk conditions that the child may have.

Generated PDFs

The generated vaccination schedule can then be saved as a PDF and shared with medical staff and parents/guardians.

AIH Calculator iMac illustrating pdf gerneration

Automated tests

With such complexity in the business rules for immunisations and their changing nature as new information becomes available, any minor changes present the risk of producing results that are not optimal. As a result, Morpht has developed several hundred automated tests that are used to confirm that all generated recommendations continue to meet the complex business rules. New automated tests are added iteratively as required.

AIH Calculator Automated Test on a MacBook

Continuous expansion

The last major revision allows users to select multiple medical at-risk conditions to be used by the calculator.

Hand holding an iphone using the AIH calculator

The outcome

The National Immunisation Catch-up Calculator is a powerful and flexible tool used by medical practitioners to confidently manage the immunisation schedules for all Australian children.

Released in June 2024, the calculator expanded from children under 10 years of age to all children and adolescents under 20 years.

This expansion included a number of new antigens, vaccines, medical conditions and business rules.