Health Department to Update County-Level Vaccine Uptake Data After Small Percentage of Cases Assigned to Wrong Counties

INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Department of Health announced today that it will be updating the county-level COVID-19 vaccination data on its dashboard at www.ourshot.in.gov after the state discovered an error in how an external vendor was assigning the county of residence for vaccine recipients.

The issue stems from an automated process that assigns vaccination records to counties in the state’s immunization registry based on ZIP codes, not full addresses. Approximately 3 percent of all COVID-19 vaccination records were assigned to the wrong county because the individual lived in a ZIP code that crossed county lines.

All counties will be impacted. About half will see their rate of fully vaccinated residents increase, while half will see their percentage decrease.

“We strive each day to provide accurate data to illustrate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination efforts,” said State Health Commissioner Kris Box, M.D., FACOG. “We know that many counties are making decisions based on the numbers we present on our dashboards, which is why we are working to correct the vaccination data as quickly as possible.”

While most of the changes are small, Franklin, Carroll, Newton, Spencer, Posey, Crawford, Benton and Brown counties will all see increases in the percentage of fully vaccinated residents totaling 5 points or more. Another seven counties – Fountain, Orange, Hendricks, Hancock, Clay, Pike and Ohio – will see decreases of 5 percentage points or more.

The changes are expected to be implemented on the dashboard within the next few weeks. Moving forward, the Indiana Department of Health will implement a new geocoding filter that allows full addresses to be evaluated prior to assigning vaccination records to a particular county.