Q&A: PIDS launches vaccine education app to combat misinformation, hesitancy
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The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society has launched The Comprehensive Vaccine Education Program to help combat vaccine misinformation and hesitancy.
The program will offer two ways to do this — the first is a web-based educational curriculum, and the second is a mobile app that provides up-to-date vaccine information, called The Vaccine Handbook App.
Healio spoke with the author of the app, Gary S. Marshall, MD, a professor of pediatrics, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases and director of the Pediatric Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, to gain a better insight on what the tool offers.
Healio: Can you briefly tell us about the advantages of having the The Vaccine Handbook available on an app?
Marshall: The Vaccine Handbook — A Practical Guide for Clinicians is probably better known as The Purple Book (TPB) because it’s purple (even the app icon is purple). Since its inception in 2004, TPB has had one purpose — to draw vaccine science and practical aspects of vaccine practice together into an accessible, comprehensive resource that is as much at home in the private office, public health clinic, academic medical center or hospital as it is in the classroom. The priority has been to distill down — but not dilute or shortchange — the universe of information about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases into language that “normal” people can understand. Please understand, I include myself among the “normal” people. Honestly, that is why I wrote the book in the first place — so that I can process and understand the information.
The entirety of the book has been available in app form (iOS only) since 2016. Now, it will be available on Android, as well as iOS, and will be updated with the 10th edition of the book.
The app is free of charge to everyone, thanks to PIDS, which has received unrestricted industry funding to make this possible. Vaccine Education from Training to Practice is a wonderful example of the power of partnership — in this case, between a professional society, academia and industry.
The app puts TPB literally at your fingertips. It is searchable and allows bookmarking, highlighting and annotation by the user. There are hyperlinks to internal material and external internet resources. Push notifications can be enabled, and there is even a text-to-speech function.
Healio: How many doctors use the app?
Marshall: There are nearly 19,000 registered users, which is huge by medical app standards. About 5,000 users are physicians. The remainder are pharmacists, nurse practitioners, nurses, physician’s assistants, medical assistants, students and trainees. Trainees have been a particular focus of the PIDS initiative, which recognizes that one of the most effective ways to ensure population-level protection against disease in the future is to create strong, knowledgeable and confident vaccine advocates today.
Healio: Has the app been updated to include information on all COVID-19 vaccines?
Marshall: The COVID-19 chapter has been one of the most challenging aspects of preparing the 10th edition. The available information changes almost daily, so Chapter 11 has been saved for last. And, yes, the app contains information about the three vaccines that are currently available in the U.S. But appreciate that COVID-19 has forced revision of many other aspects of the book. For example, a year ago we were not talking about messenger RNA and adenovirus vector-based vaccines that tens of millions of people have already received (hence, revisions to vaccine immunology and development). Likewise, TPB was about infectious disease epidemiology as we knew it (for example, R0, the basic reproduction number); now we also need to understand k, the overdispersion factor.