AFIX Visits

The purpose of AFIX visits are to assist and support healthcare personnel by assessing HPV vaccination rates and identifying opportunities for improving vaccine delivery practices. AFIX is made up of four parts: Assessment, Feedback, Incentives, and eXchange.

You can get more involved with your AFIX visits by doing the following:

• Setting a goal to increase the number of adolescent AFIX visits. For example, strive to increase visits by a certain percentage that is attainable by your program.
• Strongly encourage a clinician-level decision maker from each practice attends both the Feedback and eXchange sessions.
• Set a goal to increase clinician coverage rates for HPV vaccination from initial to follow-up assessments.
• Identify clinicians who will act as HPV vaccination champions and engage them to provide clinician-to-clinician education during AFIX conversations. This education can include information about HPV disease and cancer, vaccination safety and effectiveness, effective HPV vaccination recommendations, and suggestions regarding feasible quality improvement initiatives.
• Develop an AFIX Quality Improvement Action Plan targeting improvement in HPV vaccination coverage.
• Incentivize a clinician to improve their HPV vaccination by generating vaccination comparison reports.
• Utilize the evidence based Quality Improvement strategies provided in the CDC AFIX Site Visit Questionnaire. These include but are not limited to; reminder/recall, developing a system in place to schedule wellness visits for patients at 11-12 years of age, regularly documenting vaccine refusals, other.

Other AFIX resources, including the CDC Policies and Procedures Guide and Site Visit Questionnaire, can be found on the AFIX website.

Examples of other work completed on AFIX can be found in a recent #PreteenVaxScene webinar, presented by Dr. Melissa Gilkey: "Research Project Update: AFIX Program Strategies for Improving HPV Vaccination Rates in the Field." Dr. Gilkey discusses the tools and strategies used by participating AFIX programs. In this webinar, Chrystal Averette of the Washington Department of Health also shared how Washington is implementing specific strategies around reminder/recall and AFIX in order to increase HPV vaccination rates.

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