HLN Consulting is thrilled to announce that the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) project has been chosen by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as innovative open technology and listed in their Digital Public Goods registry. Technologies included in the list are considered to be digital public goods in alignment with the Digital Public Goods Standard. ICE now appears in the Digital Public Goods registry where it is discoverable as a digital public good and reflected on a growing network of catalogs and aggregated lists of digital public goods. The DPGA believes that sharing digital innovation is crucial to building a more equitable world.

The DPGA is a new international initiative that aims to accelerate the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in low- and middle-income countries by investing and sharing open technologies. This includes open source software, data, AI models, standards, and content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices. The Digital Public Goods Standard is a set of specifications and guidelines designed to maximize consensus about whether something conforms to the definition of digital public goods laid out by the UN Secretary-General in the 2020 Roadmap to Digital Cooperation.

ICE is a free, open-source immunization forecasting evaluation and software system whose default immunization schedule supports all routine childhood, adolescent, and adult immunizations in the United States. It is based on the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). As an open source platform ICE can be adapted to meet the guidelines used in other countries.  

ICE utilizes its immunization rules and patient data to evaluate and return the validity of each immunization in the patient’s history along with one or more evaluation reasons. It also returns a recommendation for each vaccine group along with one or more recommendation reasons. 

Noam Arzt, President of HLN Consulting stated “For us, being recognized as a digital public good means expanding the exposure to the ICE open source software and minimizing the barriers to installing and using ICE anywhere in the world. With the COVID pandemic still present in many countries worldwide, ICE is a major open source tool available to ensure that the proper vaccinations are administered at the right time.” 

Arzt added that “While ICE rules are currently based on US ACIP recommendations, it can be adapted to include rules based on WHO clinical guidelines or country-specific requirements.” Arzt emphasized that that flexibility is one of the key reasons why HLN Consulting chose open source as their development model nearly ten years ago when HLN began the development of ICE. HLN developed ICE in collaboration with several state and local public health agencies who collaborated on the project.

For any inquiries on the ICE project please reach out to Noam Arzt. For more information on the Digital Public Goods Alliance please reach out to[email protected]. Click here for the press release.