#17 on the List of Things I've Always Wanted To Know But Hadn't Taken The Time To Figure Out - how much vaccine is in your fridge at any given time?  And what are those vaccines worth?  An interesting math problem, but a fair amount of work and requires a lot of assumptions.

At the behest of some friends, and with help from my crew at PCC, I had the opportunity and support to do the work, and I thought I'd share my method and results here.

Part 1: What vaccines are in your fridge?

The first thing I had to do was actually count all the vaccines in your fridges, over time.  Not easy, but I had a lot of help.

This part of the exercise wasn't possible until the introduction of vaccine inventory functionality to our clients about 10y ago.  It also requires that our clients use the vaccine inventory tools properly.  With the help of one of our mad scientists, we grabbed monthly snapshots of all our client vaccine inventory and began to tease it apart.  

After a lot of data normalization and some assumptions about anomalous results, here's what we arrived at.  We used the sample from November 2025, as November is the month with the highest vaccine inventory year over year.

I know it's not November, but take a look at your vaccines for me, please.  On a practice level, do these results look sane?  I realize practice sizes vary significantly (more on that below), but do you have ~100 Rota in your fridge?  70 HepB?   I know that you can't have .06 of a Yellow Fever vaccine, it means that one out of every 16-17 practices has one.  Or one in a hundred practices stocks 5.  

Note that this covers VFC and private stock, I'm not making that distinction right now.

Part 2: What are those vaccines worth?

The next step seems obvious, but it's tricky because vaccines are tracked by CVX and not a specific product.  Some products share CVX codes.  Combine that with shifting prices and no actual understanding of what our clients paid for each vaccine.  So, I made some assumptions about product use (that could be wrong) and decided to use the ASP from the CDC - after all, it's what the vaccines are worth, not what you paid for them.  It looks something like this:

So, there it is.  According to my rough rule-of-thumb, the average pediatric practice has about $250K in the fridge.  Thoughts?

Part 3: How to express these figures in a useful manner?

Oh, wait, you say?  You need to understand how to apply this to your practice?  Here is a table of the results on a per-clinician basis.  I've had to make even more assumptions to get the results to fit in a neat box, but I think I'm close.

There you go - on average, each pediatrician - at peak volume - has about $65K of vaccines in the fridge.

Thoughts?