As COVID-19 vaccines continue rolling out across the country, CMS is taking action to protect the health and safety of our nation’s patients and providers and keeping you updated on the latest COVID-19 resources from HHS, CDC and CMS.
With information coming from many different sources, CMS has up-to-date resources and materials to help you share important and relevant information on the COVID- 19 vaccine with the people that you serve. You can find these and more resources on the COVID-19 Partner Resources Page and the HHS COVID Education Campaign page. We look forward to partnering with you to promote the safety of vaccines and encourage our beneficiaries to get vaccinated when they have the opportunity.
If you manage healthcare staff:
CDC and CMS have useful COVID-19 vaccine resources and ready-made materials you can use to inform your healthcare personnel. Medical centers, pharmacies, and clinicians can use or adapt these ready-made materials to build confidence about COVID-19 vaccination among your healthcare teams and other staff.
The CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccination Communication Toolkit For Medical Centers, Pharmacies, and Clinicians is a resource that provides ready-made materials that can be used to educate healthcare teams and staff and to give them tool they can use to educate patients and answer their questions about the vaccines. The toolkit includes:
- How to Build Confidence in COVID-19 Vaccines: A Short Guide for Immunization Coordinators in Medical Centers and Clinics – This informational guide presents six strategies for immunization coordinators to build vaccine confidence within their health system or clinics. It includes tangible actions to promote confidence, communication, and uptake of COVID-19 vaccine, which can help support confidence among providers and patients.
- Communications and Confidence Readiness Checklist – Use this checklist to assess the readiness of your facility to promote COVID-19 vaccine to healthcare personnel, and eventually, to patients. Each activity in the checklist includes links to corresponding CDC resources that you can tailor to the needs of your facility and the populations you serve.
- The COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Conversation Starter – This conversation starter is a prompt for engaging healthcare providers during an in-person or virtual meeting in order to identify tailored approaches to promote vaccine confidence within a facility.
- Vaccine with Confidence – Use CDC’s Vaccinate with Confidence strategy to reinforce confidence in COVID-19 vaccines.
- Answering Your Questions About the New COVID-19 Vaccines – This fact sheet for healthcare personnel addresses common questions about the safety and efficacy of the new vaccines.
- V-safe After Vaccination Health Checker – Healthcare personnel can use this tool to receive personalized health check-ins after they receive a COVID-19 vaccine, and should encourage all COVID-19 vaccine recipients to participate. V-safe also provides second vaccine dose reminders if needed, and telephone follow up to anyone who reports medically significant adverse events.
- Posters that you can download, print, and hang in health facility common areas and staff break rooms to foster conversation and make vaccination visible:
- Healthcare Workers and Employees: Stopping the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Going to Take All of Our Tools
- Healthcare Workers and Employees: Three Reasons Why You Were Given Top Priority To Be Vaccinated Against COVID‑19
- Healthcare Workers and Employees: Why Get Vaccinated? To Protect Yourself, Your Coworkers, Your Patients, Your Family
- Healthcare Workers and Employees: Get Vaccinated, Get Your Smartphone, Get Started With v-safe
- Printable stickers in ORANGE and WHITE for staff to wear once they’ve gotten their vaccine.
- Slide presentations and accompany scripts are available to help health systems, clinics, and pharmacies educate healthcare personnel, teams and immunization coordinators about COVID-19 vaccination and build vaccine confidence within their organization:
- How CDC is Making COVID-19 Vaccine Recommendations Video – COVID-19 vaccines will be an important tool to help stop this pandemic. CDC’s Dr. Cohn explains how the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent group of experts, develops recommendations and advises CDC on the use of vaccines in our country and the process for making recommendations on COVID-19 vaccines.
CMS maintains a COVID-19 Provider Toolkit to ensure health care providers have the necessary tools to respond to the COVID-19 public health emergency. CMS recently added up to date payment allowances for COVID-19 vaccine administration, including the new Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine.
The MLN Connects® Newsletter is also a great source of Medicare updates, including the latest information about vaccines as they become available.
Questions? Please e-mail us: Partnership@cms.hhs.gov