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When Sydney bus driver Ke Hua presented to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital last week for his Covid-19 vaccination, he received startling news.
The nurses told him he was already fully vaccinated.
Relying on the Australian Immunization Register (the Air), the national immunization records database, hospital staff told him he received his first dose on March 26 and his second on June 18.
There was just one problem: the disc was completely wrong. He hadn’t had any doses.
“I went on July 24 and they said ‘Oh in March you have one, and in June you have one,'” Hua told the Guardian. “I said ‘I never did!’ “
While Hua, 58, managed to convince nurses to ignore the records and give him the jab, he was concerned about the mistake.
He called NSW Health, Medicare and even the local police, believing that someone may have used their contact details fraudulently.
He was swept away.
Hua was trying to alert the manager that the error might affect others as well.
Such problems, if prevalent, would greatly compromise vaccine deployment.
“That’s what worried me,” he said. “That’s why I called them.
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Finally, after questions from Guardian Australia, he was called by health officials, who said someone must have inadvertently entered a stranger’s vaccinations on his record.
The explanation does not make sense to Hua.
“How can they put someone else in my file?” Hua said. “The file has my number and my name, and to put it they have to get all of my information to put it on the computer.”
The system is supposed to be both secure and designed to prevent vendors from entering inaccurate information.
Services Australia, which manages the Air, says there are “specific systems and processes” to ensure that immunization providers capture accurate information about a person’s immunization.
“The supplier is responsible for ensuring that the information is correct,” said a spokesperson.
The ministry said it takes all data quality issues seriously and recognizes “the need for accurate and up-to-date data on an individual’s immunization record.”
“We are working closely with the Ministry of Health to provide support to immunization providers, which makes it as easy as possible to provide quality information to the Air,” the spokesperson said. “To further increase the accuracy of records kept on Air, enhancements have been made to the Air Online systems to include ‘real-time’ assessment of immunization data submitted by immunization providers. “
Services Australia did not respond to whether it had received numerous reports of errors with the Air.
Accurate records of the Covid-19 vaccination will likely be essential as the world begins to open up. Countries are likely to adopt vaccine passports at their borders and also restrict those who can participate in social activities and employment due to their immunization status.
Yet previous studies of Air have shown that it is subject to significant error rates. A 2018 study that examined the accuracy of Air records for childhood immunizations found 14% to be inaccurate.
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The error rate ranged from 3% in Victoria to 29% in New South Wales.
The most common error was caused by the failure to transfer vaccination information from the software used by practice management to Air. About 26% of these cases were caused by data entry errors by practice staff.
Duplicate registrations, website errors, and the use of paper registrations also caused inaccurate registry information.
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