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In spring 1993, The Atlanta Project (TAP) recruited over 7,000 volunteers who went door-to-door to collect data and distribute information about vaccinations. Their efforts prompted visits by 16,000 children in one week to immunization sites for shots or to have their health records updated. Following that effort, a coalition of health providers, the Metro Atlanta Team for Child Health (MATCH), began developing a data base to track the health and vaccination records of Atlanta's children for the first time. Working with TAP and The Task Force for Child Survival and Development, a partner of The Carter Center, MATCH announced its new registry program in May. The registry now lists over 100,000 children and over 1 million records for each of the 12 shots required by age 2.

"TAP was the catalyst for offering health care providers a new means of improving immunization rates in our area," said Mark Shields, M.D., chairman of MATCH. "The Atlanta registry program is serving as a model for a new state immunization registry recently approved by the Georgia General Assembly."

MATCH is providing free software to all public and private health practitioners in the Atlanta area. The software allows immediate access to each patient's medical history, whether the child is seeing his or her regular family physician or a new doctor across town. All information is confidential, available only to a child's health care provider and the state health department.