2. Data extraction methods

To extract appointment information from provider sources, there are several different methods that work best for providers’ particular appointment systems (e.g. custom system vs. VAMS vs. Epic). Below, we highlight the different data extraction methods, and their pros and cons, for ultimately surfacing appointments to your residents:

The table answers: How is your appointment finder now going to aggregate and surface the provider sources’ appointments?

Data extraction methods	Pros and cons
API calls	Most major pharmacy chains and hospital systems have API* integrations available to obtain appointment data, but they often require negotiating data use agreements.
Web scraping	Data is extracted from providers' web pages. This is often quick to implement and may not require agreements with the provider, but requires constant effort to maintain. Small tweaks to providers' pages can cause a scraper to stop working.
Provider-driven updates	Providers are asked to directl complete digital forms about whether they have appointments or not. This is relatively easy to set up, but because appointments can come and go very quickly, a manual process can often be out of date.
Robocalling	A computer calls a list of providers, with follow-up by state personnel for each "positive appointment" robocall. Robocalling is helpful for collecting richer, qualitative data by provider, but is too slow for up-to-minute availability and requires significant, high-touch human effort.

There will be some vaccine providers and/or provider locations for which you simply cannot extract data. That's not a failure!

The reality is that a successful VAF will never cover every single provider. Instead, every individual provider you share definitive appointment availability for saves your residents real time and frustration. Even if you don’t have high appointment coverage at the start, you’re already delivering substantive value. Your team can always iterate and add more provider types and data extraction methods on an ongoing basis.

*Application programming interface, an intermediary tool that allows your appointment finder to programmatically read appointment data from disparate providers' systems.