National Immunisation Management System (NIMS)
NIMS was initially provided by the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance and supported the management of the influenza and Covid-19 vaccination programmes across England. It was delivered in partnership with NHS South Central & West CSU.
NIMS supported almost every aspect of the national vaccination programme, from identifying prioritised patients to be vaccinated, through to recording vaccinations as they were given.
The system was commissioned for the enhanced winter flu programme in August 2020 ahead of the Covid-19 vaccination programme.
The national Covid-19 system went live in November 2020. It processed vaccinations given at 1,500 vaccination sites and fed the NHS data store which was used to inform vaccination centre operations.
NIMS was the National Immunisation System of Record and provided data for Public Health England, NHS England and at ministerial level.
NIMS provided the following:
- A system to support the NHS SCW Immunisation Management Service, designed to improve immunisation uptake.
- A single data store holding vaccination records for more than 60m people, in near real-time.
- A call and recall service that identified groups of eligible individuals according to age and clinical priority using the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) guidance. This service used mail, email and text messaging and applied the latest patient and vaccination data to ensure that the eligible patients were called. It also supported the recall of people who had not taken up their offer of first or second dose.
- A vaccination capture application called NIMS DC, which is was used to capture details of vaccinations as they were given. This was one of three data capture applications integrated with the NIMS system. Vaccination sites could alternatively use Pinnacle from PharmOutcomes or NIVS from Arden and Gem CSU. Both of these also fed captured data back into the NIMS data store.
- A reporting and analytics package which allowed vaccination activity to be analysed in near real-time.
- Dashboards for analytics to increase immunisation uptake and manage local vaccination programmes (see detail below).
