Immunisations and AIR

The Immunisations tab in Light is a window onto the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR). Understanding what's stored where — and what happens when they disagree — clears up most "why is the data wrong?" questions.

AIR is the source of truth

Every vaccination on a customer's history comes from AIR, whether the vaccination was given at your pharmacy or somewhere else. Light doesn't hold a parallel list. When you open the Immunisations tab, Light asks AIR for the customer's history and renders the response.

This has two consequences:

• What you see matches what every other provider sees. If another pharmacy gives the customer a flu vaccine tomorrow, it appears here once they submit it to AIR.
• The view depends on AIR being reachable. If AIR is down or the customer can't be matched, the history doesn't render.

Recording flows back to AIR

When you record a vaccination at your pharmacy, Light creates a vaccination encounter record locally and submits it to AIR. The submission carries everything AIR needs: identity, product, batch, dose, route, site, and claim information.

Until AIR accepts the submission, the vaccination is on the customer's encounter but not on their AIR history. Once AIR accepts it, the history updates.

Submissions can fail — most commonly due to identity mismatches, expired Medicare, or a missing IHI. The encounter shows the AIR error code when this happens; you fix the cause and resubmit rather than recreating the encounter.

Identity, not records, is the link

Light and AIR don't share an ID. The link is the customer's real-world identifiers — Medicare, IHI, date of birth, name. When Light asks AIR for history, it sends these; AIR matches and responds.

This is why:

• Editing a customer's name or date of birth in Light doesn't update AIR. Identity corrections go through Services Australia.
• Medicare changes matter. An expired or incorrect Medicare number breaks the link; history may disappear until it's fixed.
• IHI is valuable. When a customer has an IHI, matching is more reliable than Medicare alone.

Exemptions and indicators travel both ways

Exemptions recorded in Light (medical contraindications, natural immunity) go to AIR and then flow back as part of the customer's AIR record. This is why they appear both on the Exemptions tab and as indicators on the Identification tab — they're the same data shown two ways.

Indicators set elsewhere (Special Risk Group, Planned Catch Up, Action Required) come from AIR and can't be edited in Light — they have to be set by a clinician working directly with AIR.

When data looks stale

• Just submitted — AIR processing can take a few minutes. Refresh the tab.
• Customer matching failed — check Medicare and date of birth.
• AIR is slow or down — Light shows an error on the tab. Try again later; nothing you do in Light fixes AIR outages.

For the mechanics of what to do when things go wrong, see the troubleshooting steps in Recording a vaccination and Viewing history.