PORTLAND -- By the end of this week, 95 percent of Maine schools will have held H1N1 flu vaccination clinics, the state's public health director said Wednesday.

"We are the first state in the nation to meet that milestone that quickly," said Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

It's a point that Maine couldn't have reached without help from health insurers, which waived some of their standard practices to get vaccine to kids faster, Mills said during a press conference held to give those insurers a pat on the back for their efforts. During the past few months, insurers have been waiving co-payments, co-insurance and deductibles for H1N1 vaccine at school clinics. They have changed their billing practices to make paperwork more clinic-friendly, and made it easier for physicians to prescribe expensive medications such as Tamiflu.

"As a physician, I would have to write a special note to a pharmacy to get these anti-viral medications," said Dr. Jeff Holmstrom, medical director of Anthem and a family practitioner in Saco. "We no longer have to do that, so if a physician feels that a member is at risk, he writes a prescription and the member gets Tamiflu. I think that's a big step forward."

Also at Wednesday's press conference were representatives of Aetna, Cigna HealthCare of Maine and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

School clinics are costly because nurses have to be hired to give the vaccine, Mills said. Part of that cost is offset by making sure the children's insurers are billed for administration of the vaccine.

"But the process for filing a claim for each and every child who is vaccinated is extremely tedious," Mills said, "and the nurses, particularly from a lot of our home health agencies, have not had the time to do that."

Maine officials developed a form that could be used for so-called roster billing, in which a school clinic simply submits a list of children to be vaccinated to each insurer. That form has become a model for health plans to use in other states where they do business, said Mila Kofman, Maine's superintendent of insurance.

Such nontraditional billing, Kofman said, "helps to ease pressure on physician offices and helps consumers avoid an extra visit to their doctor."

Those practices also make sense financially for the insurance companies because treating a bad case of H1N1 costs a lot more than paying for a preventive immunization, a fact the insurers acknowledged.

Many of the practices are being implemented nationwide by their companies, they said.

No one knows how long insurers will continue to waive costs and bend the rules.

"It's a little premature to speculate because we don't know what events will transpire," said Dr. Joseph Agostini, medical director of Aetna, "but I think we'll continue to work closely together. We have no pre-defined ending."

Mills said some of the strategies used in the school vaccination clinics will probably be used in other settings, including clinics for adults, as soon as more H1N1 vaccine becomes available.

And Mills hinted that she would like to see roster billing used in seasonal flu clinics in the future. Seasonal flu clinics have traditionally focused heavily on the elderly, who have Medicare, "but that's changing," she said.