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.
Tying a string around the finger: make sure we ask "Hey, are you suspiciously getting *no* appointments?"
Because if you're in California and you have a box of coronavirus vaccines and no appointments are coming in *lack of demand is certainly not your problem.*
"Why didn't someone realize?"
It wasn't anyone's job, specifically, to realize. Until it was our job.
Not the pharmacist's fault! They were seeing lots of patients every day, for many medicines! Just not the one box in the corner!
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Yesterday, Los Angeles County approved distribution of vaccines to people over the age of 65.
Vaccinate CA began calling pharmacies yesterday afternoon. Many had not yet achieved institutional clarity required to administer the vaccine.
This morning, we had a small team quickly call several pharmacies in Los Angeles as soon as they opened. Many had achieved institutional clarity overnight, and were now administering the vaccine.
We immediately surged much of today's call capacity over Los Angeles.
This contributed to discovering and listing 60 new locations which could actually administer the vaccine today, bringing the total number of places where we can recommend someone try to get the vaccine or get an available appointment to 216.
VaccinateCA.com calls medical professionals daily to ask who they could vaccinate and how to get in line. We publish this, covering the entire state of California, to help more people get their vaccines faster. Please tell your friends and networks.
If you work in government, we would like to help you get the word out to your constituents. You can email partners@vaccinateca.com to discuss, or you can go ahead and point them at our website w/ no coordination required.
Media inquiries to media@vaccinateca.com
If you'd like to help, the single most helpful thing you can do of today is help people you know get vaccinated. Accessing the vaccine is difficult, and if you're reading this you are more likely to be successful than people you may know.
* Call a few hundred pharmacies. We are explicit looking for process errors between multiple parties that are causing shots to stay in boxes rather tan go in arms.
* If we identify those errors, we want to try repeating remote diagnosis and remediation of the error, by (for example) reporting it to the pharmacy chain, to the government, to the scheduling software vendor, etc etc. We don't know how effective we'll be, but this worked once.
* Work on supplementing our all-volunteer force of phone bankers with committed availability of professionals. Are views are evolving rapidly (again, we didn't exist 8 days ago), but we think volunteers working next to our engineers/etc help us learn and pros help us scale.
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.
* 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."