Peer-reviewed article
Vaccination Coverage Quality Indicators (VCQI): a flexible open-source tool for survey data analysis.
Dale A Rhoda, Caitlin B Clary, Mary Kay Trimner, Mia Yu, Jennifer Brustrom et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001VCQI is an open-source statistical software tool developed by WHO and PAHO to analyze vaccination coverage survey data. It calculates standardized indicators of vaccination access, coverage, continuity, and quality from child health records and caregiver recall. The tool can process data from multiple survey types including Demographic and Health Surveys, Multiple-Indicator Cluster Surveys, and Expanded Programme on Immunization surveys. VCQI has been available as Stata scripts since 2015 and recently became available as an R package. The software produces tables, figures, and augmented datasets that support standardized reporting of vaccination coverage globally.
Key points
- VCQI examines data from child vaccination records and caregiver recall to calculate indicators of vaccination access, coverage, continuity, and quality
- The tool can analyze data from routine immunization surveys, post-campaign coverage surveys, and maternal tetanus coverage surveys
- VCQI produces output tables and figures that can be copied directly into reports and presentations
- The software has been available as Stata scripts since 2015 and as of 2025 is also available as an R package named vcqiR
- Future versions may be extended to analyze data from electronic immunization registries
Limitations
This document describes a statistical tool rather than evaluating an intervention's impact on child health outcomes. It does not provide evidence about whether increased vaccination coverage using this tool improves child survival or disease prevention.
Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) and Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) make statistical software scripts freely available to conduct standardized analysis of vaccination coverage surveys. The software and accompanying documentation are named the Vaccination Coverage Quality Indicators (VCQI). The software examines data from child vaccination records and caregiver recall to calculate indicators of vaccination access, coverage, continuity, and quality. VCQI produces output tables and figures that may be copied directly into reports and presentations, as well as survey response data sets augmented with child-level outcome indicator variables calculated according to WHO guidance. It can analyze data from routine immunization surveys, post-campaign coverage surveys, and maternal tetanus coverage surveys. VCQI may be used for either the primary analysis of data from new surveys or secondary analysis of earlier surveys. It can analyze data from USAID Demographic and Health Surveys, UNICEF Multiple-Indicator Cluster Surveys, or WHO Expanded Programme on Immunization surveys. Future versions of VCQI may be extended to analyze data from electronic immunization registries. VCQI has been available as a set of Stata scripts since 2015, and as of 2025, the core routine immunization indicators are also available as a new R package named vcqiR. To publicize VCQI's features and capabilities and to celebrate the milestone of R package availability, the authors share this special report to describe the VCQI vision and design, discuss analyses and insights available from it, and map our vision of what the future may hold for flexible standardized analysis of vaccination coverage data.