Tool Creates Personalized Catch-up Immunization Schedules

Program helps doctors and parents plan after missing childhood vaccinations

A new downloadable software tool will help pediatricians, parents and other health care professionals determine how to adjust complex childhood immunization schedules when one or more vaccine doses aren't received at the proper time.


Once a child falls behind in the vaccination schedule, health care professionals are left to figure out when it's appropriate to give any missed vaccines and any future vaccines. They typically have to construct a unique, personalized catch-up schedule for each child - often while the child sits in the treatment room.


"Physicians have been telling us for years that they needed a computerized program to tell them when to give vaccines after a child misses scheduled immunizations," said Larry Pickering, executive secretary of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the CDC and a collaborator on the project. "Now this tool is available for health care professionals and parents to use and they are excited to use it."

The tool, designed by Pinar Keskinocak, associate professor in Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and graduate student Faramroze Engineer, is available for download from the CDC Web site (

The program removes the challenging task of simultaneously considering complex rules, guidelines and discretionary considerations when creating a catch-up schedule. A physician or caregiver simply inputs a child's date of birth and previous immunization dates, and the program displays a personalized schedule of the recommended dates to administer all future vaccines.



It is important that children are protected against diseases by getting vaccinated. Since vaccines contain weakened viruses or parts of organisms that cause disease, the body's immune system reacts to the vaccine the same as it would if it were being invaded by the disease, but without getting sick.




The scheduler follows the guidelines developed and revised each year by ACIP in collaboration with the AAP and the American Academy of Family Physicians. These guidelines include the feasible number, timing and spacing of doses of each vaccine based on the child's age, the number of doses and the age at which each dose was administered.






"The benefit of dynamic programming is that it eliminates solutions or partial solutions that are not promising - those that won;t lead to the optimal solution," said Keskinocak.


"In an ideal world, every child would receive their vaccines at the recommended times, but since this isn't a perfect world, this tool developed at Georgia Tech allows children to correctly catch-up once they fall behind," added Pickering.

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Technical Contact: Pinar Keskinocak (404-894-2325); E-mail: (

Writer: Abby Vogel

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