A Bundled, Practice-Based Intervention to Increase HPV Vaccination

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates are suboptimal, and missed vaccination opportunities are common. We hypothesized that a bundled intervention improves missed HPV vaccination opportunities.

We used a pre-post design to assess differences in HPV vaccine missed opportunities (visits when vaccine-eligible adolescents are not vaccinated). We compared rates for a 12-month period before vs those for a 6-month period (February 23, 2022, to August 9, 2022) during a bundled intervention. We implemented the bundled intervention in 24 primary care pediatric practices that had been usual care controls for a prior randomized trial. The bundled intervention involved 3 components: online clinician training on HPV vaccine communication, performance feedback on missed HPV vaccination opportunities, and clinician prompts for HPV vaccination. As a secondary analysis, we compared missed opportunities for these 24 practices vs 48 contemporaneous comparison group practices identified retrospectively.

For well-child care (WCC) visits, missed HPV vaccination opportunities were improved during vs before the intervention by 4.8 percentage points (95% CI, -7.2% to -2.4%) for initial HPV vaccine doses and a modest 2.2 percentage points (95% CI, -4.4% to -0.0%) for subsequent doses. For other visit types, findings ruled out changes beyond minimal improvements. Missed vaccination opportunity rates for initial HPV vaccination at WCC visits were similar for the 24 intervention practices vs the 48 comparison practices for a 4.5-year period before the intervention, but they improved for intervention practices and worsened for comparison practices during the intervention period (difference, -6.6%; 95% CI, -9.3% to -3.8%).

This bundled intervention appeared to improve HPV vaccination during WCC visits.