New Mexico Department of Health boosts vaccine outreach with cleaner address data

The New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) is the state’s lead agency for public health programs and services, including disease prevention, health promotion, and emergency response.

Among their many responsibilities, NMDOH operates the New Mexico Statewide Immunization Information System (NMSIIS), a centralized registry used by over 25,000 users across healthcare organizations, pharmacies, schools, and government entities to track vaccinations and support public health initiatives. Their vision involves empowering health equity initiatives and promoting the health and well-being of people in New Mexico.

With over 3 million patient records and 42 million vaccines logged, NMSIIS plays a critical role in New Mexico’s ability to manage immunization notifications, outbreak response, and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention reporting.

With over 25,000 users entering or exchanging data simultaneously—from healthcare providers to school nurses—the accuracy of patient addresses was critical for patient healthcare. However, with so many active users and ongoing data entries, it was incredibly hard to manage. Where one record was updated by one doctor, a follow-up visit or trip to a specialist in another building overwrites the updated information, and not always correctly.

Before implementing Smarty, NMDOH struggled with:

Poor quality data slowed efforts down, limiting their ability to spend time on what they do best: identifying underserved populations, targeting outreach during disease outbreaks, and fulfilling federal grant deliverables that fund the program.

NMDOH adopted Smarty’s address validation solution in 2019 through a recommendation from the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA), a consortium partner. Easy integration helped NMDOH implement Smarty without any disruption to their workflows.

Smarty was integrated into the NMSIIS system in two key ways:

Smarty also helps identify duplicate records by comparing address accuracy and timestamps, supporting more confident record deduplication and improving database confidence before mailing time-sensitive vaccination notifications.

Quickly after implementing Smarty, Kathryn (Katie) Cruz (NMSIIS Manager at NMDOH), Felicia Martinez (Data Quality Assurance Health Educator at NMDOH), and the rest of the NMDOH team noticed a meaningful shift in their day-to-day work.

"Over the past 5 years, the sum of non-match addresses has dropped from 13,874 per year to 1,278 per year, a 90% improvement," said Katie.

This indicates that most of the address data used for Reminder/Recall outreach has now been validated.

Of the current 3.6 million active patients in the registry, 79% of the physical and/or mailing addresses had been validated by early 2025 since the implementation of Smarty in 2019. In the last 6 months, nearly 95% of the validated addresses were completed using the automated job processing within the ISS, while just over 5% were manually reviewed and validated by NMSIIS staff.

That was life-changing for NMDOH.

One of the clearest signs of success is a dramatic reduction in undeliverable mail. Reminder and recall postcards for upcoming or overdue vaccines now reach more of their intended recipients. “We saw a drastic drop in returned mail,” added Felicia.

Behind the scenes, the data became noticeably cleaner and more reliable. After initially validating millions of addresses in their database, their verification of incoming addresses has dropped below 100,000 per day.

These improvements also led to stronger federal reporting and funding outcomes. Clean, validated addresses support accurate CDC reports, help secure cooperative agreement grant funding, and ensure more precise outreach during public health emergencies.

Perhaps most impressively, all of this was installed without negatively impacting staff workload. Smarty’s address validation was easy to implement.

“It was very straightforward,” said Felicia. “Any questions that I had initially were answered. The couple of times where I did have questions, I could find what I needed on Smarty’s website or by contacting support.”

She went on to say that it was intuitive to use and fit seamlessly into NMDOH’s existing workflows. New users picked it up quickly, and it’s now a natural, trusted part of the department's operation.