The public health approach to prevention follows four main steps to prevent injuries and violence and minimize their consequences when they occur.

The systematic processes are:

1. Describe the problem and perform surveillance.
2. Identify causes and risk and protective factors.
3. Develop, implement, and evaluate prevention strategies.
4. Disseminate and ensure widespread adoption. The goal of the app is to serve as a guide that can provide easily accessible and understandable information and data on the size and scope of specific injuries in Indiana, while highlighting effective evidence-based solutions to the problem of injury.

The Indiana Travel Advisory app is meant to help users stay aware of changing travel conditions.

Features include:

• Ability for users to set alerts for any county or counties they choose, up to every county in the state. When the travel status in a selected county is changed, the user will receive an alert notification.
• Weather conditions for each county. Tapping on a county will display the temperature and an icon with the current conditions.
• Contact information for county emergency management agencies, which are responsible for the status updates.

The State reports data provided by county Emergency Management Agencies (EMAs). Some counties only update data when there has been a change in status and do not reaffirm that everything is ‘Normal.’

For example, County X may not have had any travel emergencies since June and has remained in the ‘Normal’ category the entire time, since the status has not changed, there has been nothing to update. The next time there is a county-level emergency impacting travel, the status is changed by the county EMA and is reflected in the app.

Other sources of travel conditions should also be consulted, including local news, travel, weather and social media sites and apps.

The Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) maintains an Immunization Information System known as CHIRP (Children and Hoosier’s Immunization Registry Program). The purpose of CHIRP is to collect, forecast, manage, and share vaccine data registered medical providers in Indiana. A provider may include private medical facilities, local health departments, hospitals, schools, and pharmacies. The program is run under the Indiana Code 16-38-5 which allows for providers and their designees to access data from CHIRP. In addition an individual also may access their personal or their dependents vaccine record from either the registered CHIRP provider or directly from the Indiana State Department of Health.

As an update to the existing process, ISDH has created the MyVaxIndiana Immunization Portal which enables a person to access a vaccine record from any computer. To begin this process a registered CHIRP provider will create a patient ID number (PIN) which will grant a person specific patient access to the record they have requested. A parent or guardian could request a PIN to view their dependents immunization history, or any individual could do the same for their own record. They then have a number of options as to how their data can be viewed and saved. This includes an option to print and save the Official Immunization Record, download the record into a file format that may be compatible with their Personal Health Record system (PHR), or have it faxed or mailed to them.