Maine

Beginning in 2019, providers in Maine were required to test all children in the state for blood lead at 1 and 2 years of age. With this new requirement, Maine’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Unit (CLPPU) anticipated that more providers would conduct in-office testing. However, CLPPU did not have a system for providers to submit in-office test results electronically. This submission required about 20% of a full-time staff person’s time to manually enter the test results each week.

CLPPU initiated a collaboration with Maine’s Immunization Program to develop a Blood Lead Module within its web-based immunization registry. One of several improvements included in the Blood Lead Module is a user interface for providers to report in-office blood lead tests electronically. In early 2019, providers who conducted in-office testing began using the module for electronic reporting of in-office blood lead test results.

As of October 2019, CLPPU trained nearly all provider offices that conduct in-office blood lead tests on using the Blood Lead Module to electronically report test results. As a result, CLPPU reduced the amount of time spent entering in-office test results by more than 80%, from over 400 hours annually to about 70 hours annually. In-office testing also increased during this time from 3,630 in-office tests completed from January to December 2018 to 3,863 tests completed from January to October 2019.