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.
We're working on easing this. More soon.
If you'd like something like this to exist in other states, we'd like to help, but we have little bandwidth to do so at this moment in time. We might in a few days. Feel free to follow along and replicate anything that seems like it is useful.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Here's what VaccinateCA.com did on Day 8 to get more Californians access to the coronavirus vaccine.
* We called hundreds of pharmacies across the state, looking for the vaccine.
* We published what the medical professionals told us, within 5 minutes of learning it.
* We confirmed previous availability had not changed at some locations, using a fraction of our calling capacity. We are working on the balance between refreshing information and finding new information by observing rate of change in status between calls to a single location.
* We redesigned our county-level detail pages to make them more accessible on mobile devices, since many of our users use them.
* We wireframed a redesign, for implementation soon, of how we present our results, so that they are more easy to understand.
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.
* 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."