Happy MLK Day. Here's what vaccinateCA.com hopes to accomplish today:

* Call ~500 pharmacies in California to learn their current status of vaccine availability.
* Improve website UX on mobile devices after relaunch on new tech stack at ~midnight.
* Continue learning nuances about pharmacy IVR systems to improve call efficiency, both for us and the responding pharmacist.

* Start scoping out multiple ways to expose our data, via e.g. a text-based interface, chatbot, etc, and APIs / ways to package for gov't frontline.
*sigh* Still got to work on that Twitter card.
(Today is Day 5 of this effort.)

We're going to start re-calling places we've already called to learn how rapidly our data set decays in utility, which might be different for Yes versus No; this will inform how we allocate call capacity going forwards.

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More from @patio11

20 Jan
I keep making a lot more references to pharmacies than other places to get vaccines, both internally and externally, and it's for a relatively simple reason:

Many individual users, at this stage in the rollout, are *relatively* ambivalent about where they find the vaccine.
Starbucks knows that, at the margin, some people won't cross the street for a cup of coffee.

That is decisively not true of everyone seeking the vaccine. They will go quite a bit out of their way.

To satisfy one, you don't have to locate the most convenient possible dose.
We optimize (at least as of Day 6) for locating the *most* doses with limited resources and attention, because we believe that likely optimizes for the most shots in arms, or is a good enough approximation to defer more complicated thinking until later.
Read 7 tweets
20 Jan
VaccinateCA.com EOD update, Day 6:

* We called several hundred pharmacies today.
* We believe we directly caused 30-50 doses of the vaccine to be introduced into circulation at "many" pharmacies. We will not know an exact count for a day or two; I suspect 10+ in bag.
(10+ *pharmacies* of supply activated.)

* We have begun planning for what other patches we can do to quickly bring more supply online. Every. Dose. Counts.

* We worked on, but did not complete, prototypes of a much better UX.

* We appear to be greatly increasing in adoption.
I'm too tired to pull numbers but a representative anecdote, from the person managing most of the sysadmin-flavored things, was "At the exact minute 4:59 PT to 5:00 PT we had a 7X increase in traffic, and I believe that was Californians picking up their personal cell phone."
Read 5 tweets
20 Jan
We successfully got dozens of doses brought online within the last 24 hours in with one marginal phone call.

Paraphrased:

Us: How would someone make an appointment with you?
Pharmacy: Go to the county website at...
Us: You know you're not on that, right?
Pharmacy: WHAT.
Us: Yep. We're quite sure.

Pharmacist called county to complain. Someone pushed some buttons. They started getting patients scheduled.
That was one phone call. We're catching so many little things like this that it blows my mind.
Read 6 tweets
19 Jan
During our due diligence for VaccinateCA, someone told us not to do it without first having X, Y, and Z ready to go.

I told him that those were all worthy things to have, but we were going live regardless, because it would create value immediately.

That was Wednesday 8 PM PT.
The first phone call was Thursday at 8:30 AM PT.

Now, a story, in three tweets.
Read 9 tweets
19 Jan
Up bright and early (joking, I live in Tokyo) to hit a Bay Area morning radio show and then work on day 6 of VaccinateCA.com

What we hope to do today:
* Call ~500 vaccine sites looking for up-to-the-minute availability. In particular, we want to probe who is not able to administer at present due to the batch which went bad, while finding who took or will take delivery today.
* Greatly improve the search experience, hopefully landing a prototype today and then rolling out today or tomorrow. You should be able to give us a few trivial facts about the vaccine seeker and get a prioritized list of recommendations.
Read 7 tweets
18 Jan
You know the sales team tradition of banging a gong when you get a commit?

We've got a gong bot that flags every time we find accessible vaccine.

I like this gong so much. (That it is not audible is a plus.)
Also like the emergent culture of people reacting to it with the :vaccine: emoji.
It's fundamentally the same purpose as the sales gong, right?

You're going to get told No, a lot. That's a useful result! Pick up the phone immediately and try to get some more Noes. Occasionally you get a Yes in there. *gong*
Read 5 tweets

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