Success story: State of New Jersey
New Jersey's approach to their vaccine appointment finder, used first by their internal call center, and now by their general public.
The USDR appointment finder collaboration with the State of New Jersey largely inspired our learnings and recommendations in this tactical implementation guide.
The original problem
New Jersey had a list of many vaccine providers in their state, but no way of systematically getting up-to-date appointment availability and additional information from them.
The iterative solution
USDR closely collaborated with New Jersey and other partners to help the state develop a solution that aggregates appointment availability information from the state’s major vaccine providers, using APIs and web scraping.
For internal call centers
The state followed a “build-as-you-go” approach: New Jersey decided to pilot its appointment finder with the state’s call center first. After the tool was built, New Jersey’s personnel started leveraging it within two days to immediately schedule appointments for residents.
New Jersey’s call center personnel have been using their vaccine appointment finder tool daily to book appointments for their inbound residents. This small set of call center internal users also gave valuable feedback to improve the vaccine appointment finder for their VAF's eventual public launch in March 2021.
For New Jersey's general public
Now, their even more user-friendly, accessible version of this appointment finder is available to the general public, to secure appointments on their own.
After the VAF's public launch, we are still adding more provider sources and data extraction methods on an ongoing basis to increase overall appointment coverage in this one consolidated tool. We highly recommend this iterative approach for all states, in order to provide continuous value and improvements for your residents.
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