Click Here To Listen Nashville Business 100 Leading Women Dr. Kelly L Moore
Kelly L. Moore, MD, MPH, has directed the Tennessee Immunization Program (TIP) in the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) for 13 years. She also holds an appointment as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Health Policy with the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. Before her current role, Dr. Moore served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and as a CDC Preventive Medicine Resident assigned to TDH.
A native of Huntsville, Alabama, she earned her medical degree from the Vanderbilt School of Medicine (2000), a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health (2000), and an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Science degree in neuroscience from Vanderbilt University in 1994. She completed a pediatric internship year at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is board certified in Preventive Medicine and Public Health.
Dr. Moore has led TIP, the state’s immunization program, through substantial growth. In the fall of 2004, TIP had 7 state employees and depended heavily on the technical expertise of field assignees from the CDC. Today, TIP has 30 staff, including 6 masters-level epidemiologists and 7 nurses. Dr. Moore and her team oversee vaccine-preventable disease surveillance and guide outbreak control. They operate the federal Vaccines for Children Program (VFC) with about 650 participating clinics that provide quality immunization services to half the state’s children and teens. She and her team also oversee the state immunization information system, or “TennIIS”. This cloud-based system maintains secure, permanent, accessible immunization records on millions of Tennesseans and helps clinicians provide quality immunization services routinely and during emergencies like the 2009 influenza pandemic.
Dr. Moore serves as the state expert advisor on immunization policy and law, and spends much of her time educating the media, the public and healthcare providers about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. She is a regular speaker at medical, nursing and public health conferences.
Dr. Moore contributes substantially to immunization policy and education beyond Tennessee. In 2006, she became the founding chair of the U.S. Association of Immunization Managers (AIM) Vaccine Storage and Handling Committee to help define and articulate the need for evidence-based vaccine storage guidance for clinicians; for several years she taught the principles of vaccine storage in the National Foundation on Infectious Diseases (NFID) Clinical Vaccinology Course. She currently serves on the NSF-International Joint Committee for Vaccine Storage Equipment Standards, which will produce the first manufacturing standards in the US specifically for vaccines.
Dr. Moore served as AIM’s liaison representative to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) from 2011-2015, before being appointed in 2015 by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to a 4-year term as a voting member. This federal advisory committee creates and votes on recommendations for the use of every licensed vaccine, directly impacting clinical practice, insurance coverage and the vaccines covered by the federal VFC entitlement program. She has co-authored three publications related to ACIP policy decisions since 2015.
Globally, Dr. Moore has been awarded educational exchange grants to study vaccine cold chain management in Albania and to participate in the World Health Organization (WHO) Pharmaceutical Cold Chain Management Course in Turkey. In 2016, she was appointed to the WHO Immunization Practices Advisory Committee (IPAC) and, subsequently, to their Programmatic Suitability for Pre-Qualification (PSPQ) Committee: both provide a programmatic perspective on WHO vaccine policy decisions.
To date, TIP has won 3 “Bull’s-Eye” awards from the US Association for Immunization Managers (AIM) for innovative projects that have enhanced TIP’s programmatic excellence. Dr. Moore’s work has been recognized by the Tennessee chapter of the American Academy of Pediatricians with the 2010 Friend of Children Award, and by AIM with the 2012 Natalie J. Smith, MD, Award for excellence in immunization program management. While serving in the U.S. Public Health Service as an EIS Officer, she received crisis service recognition for her role in the response to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks of 2001. Outside of TIP, she has served since 2012 on the Board of Directors of Siloam Health, a non-profit clinic serving the uninsured with a focus on refugee and immigrant health.