Maine
The State of Maine received $350,000 through cooperative agreement EH21-2102 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in FY 2022. The funds address childhood lead poisoning prevention and surveillance programmatic activities being conducted from September 30, 2022 to September 29, 2023.
The strategies focus on
- Ensuring blood lead testing and reporting
- Enhancing blood lead surveillance
- Improving linkages to recommended services
To learn more about these efforts in Maine, contact the program below.
Maine Department of Health and Human Services
Division of Environmental Health
221 State St
Augusta, ME 04330
Phone: 207-287-4311
Maine Eases Reporting Burden by Achieving Electronic Blood Lead Test Reporting Goal
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.
Funding for this work was made possible in part by EH17-1701 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The views expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services; nor does mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.