The thinking needs to change to fast track vaccine roll outs
Another lockdown in Victoria and rising case numbers makes fast-tracking a vaccine rollout critical. Adoption of new thinking is urgently required, leveraging the best executive thinking, technology and customer centric design. Three key steps can fast track progress:
1) Ask for and accept help
Call on Corporate Australia for help: there is significant expertise and more importantly connections in corporate Australia to improve logistics and executive planning. Most large organisations proudly sprout their corporate social responsibility and skilled volunteering programs: ask executives for the very specific resources needed to help solve very specific problems, and second them in.
2) Put the people first and make thing easy
Since last Friday, Victorians have demonstrated a huge willingness to opt into vaccinations, as evidence by queues at vaccination centres. However, this has not been easy: the phone line is constantly at capacity, there is no online booking capability, wait time information is inaccurate, and inconsistent approaches are adopted across vaccine centres. All of this is testing the goodwill and willingness of the community. There are simple technologies and processes which can be easily deployed to improve the experience:
· Regarding vaccine wait times: use car park or people movement technologies to accurately measure the time people are arriving and leaving major vaccine centres to report wait times on the web.
· Book follow up appointments for second vaccine on the way out the door at all services: don’t leave this to the health service to decide or the general public to remember. We don’t need another vaccine crush in three weeks’ time when the pfizer boosters are due. Yet, as of lunchtime today, it was not even possible to book a booster appointment time at the Showgrounds Hub (one of the largest) either at the venue or on the phone line after a lengthy wait: I was directed to an alternate, inconvenient vaccination centre.
· Make vaccine available to all those in contact with any health services, regardless of age and purpose of visit. Whenever the public is at a hospital or a GP offer a vaccination on the way out, and confirm a follow up appointment for booster shot.
3) Accept imperfect but infinitely better solutions
Accessing a vaccine appointment is very difficult in Victoria: the phone line rings out or has long wait times and there is no online booking tool available. The web booking system under development appears to have all the bells and whistles, and my bet is that the failure to make the system available is due to a complex design (including a requirement to link the bookings into the individual technology systems of all the vaccine providers). To roll out a solution quickly, this thinking needs to change. What’s needed is a database with essential information only: contact details, the vaccine appointment details and a unique identifier (Medicare number).
This takes the problem of booking out of the hands of the many and places it in the hands of the few: the vaccine administrators in the health services. Separate business processes can then be deployed by the health services to staff the vaccine centres based on booking numbers, and update Medicare and individual health records independent of booking system. Not perfect, but workable, and should be able to be deployed very quickly.
I’m not pretending this is easy. I acknowledge the issues with vaccine supply and staffing. And, I don’t doubt that there are many, many people working really hard to implement better tools and processes. We need to find a path to living with covid, in order to protect our wellbeing and economy from lockdowns and vaccines have a key role to play. Leveraging established skills and technologies can improve the rollout.
What are your ideas?
