Vaccine Provider Guide
  • COVID-19 Vaccine Provider Guide: A Technology Lens
  • Introduction
    • How is this guide different?
    • Who created this guide?
    • Next steps after reading this guide
  • Vaccination Rollout
    • Background
    • Key Areas
      • 1. Confirming eligibility of patients
      • 2. Scheduling appointments and reminders
      • 3. Collecting patient information
      • 4. Administering vaccines on-site
      • 5. Reporting data to your state’s Immunization Information System (IIS)
      • 6. Billing insurance and claims for the uninsured
      • 7. Managing vaccine inventory (ongoing)
      • 8. Communicating with the public (ongoing)
        • Key considerations for messaging
        • Public communication templates & resources
          • Free county website template
          • USDR research on at-risk and vulnerable communities
          • Guidance from public health practioners
          • Helpful government sites
      • Miscellaneous considerations
  • Tech tools
    • Tool Categories
    • Vendor Categories
      • How to Evaluate Vendors
        • Identify your goals and constraints
        • Choose vendors to evaluate
        • Answer key questions
        • Scheduling / queue management tool - Questions
        • Patient registration tool - Questions
    • Switching Vendors
      • Switching Costs
      • Contract Modifications & Switching
    • Summary of Findings
      • Common Challenges
      • Evaluating Media
      • Common User Interface Issues
      • Outages and Downtime
      • Limitations of Technology
    • Vendor Reviews
  • What's next?
  • Acknowledgements
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  1. Tech tools
  2. Summary of Findings

Common Challenges

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Last updated 4 years ago

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Vaccine scheduling systems frequently encounter many of the same issues. Look below for information about what these issues are

Challenge

Explanation

System outages / Scalability

See our section on for more information

User Interface issues

We have seen a number of trends in user interface design of these systems. More on this in our section on

Translations or accessibility issues

These should be a high priority given the audiences these tools need to be able to work with. They are also easier to fix, if they are prioritized. But keep in mind:

  1. Google Translate is often not an acceptable translation mechanism - when translating short words and phrases, Google lacks the context to differentiate between such words as "back" as in "a person's back", and "back" as in "previous page".

  2. Prefer human-created translations to ensure preservation of context

  3. Evaluate both the original text and translated text with an eye toward readability/literacy level. Many text editors have functionality built in to assess this.

Overbooking/double booking

This is likely related to one of the following, which can be harder to fix:

1. The lack of an appointment hold mechanism - certain systems have this, others do not. Adding this to a system that does not have it can be difficult.

2. Fallout from the system being down or being under heavy traffic

Local Differences

EHR and IIS systems present a challenge on the ground and differ widely between jurisdictions. Just because a system is easy to implement in one place does not make it easy to implement in another.

User lockout / account issues

These can be caused by:

  1. The way login is implemented in a particular system

    1. Where possible, and see our user interface guidelines for more information, a system should avoid asking for too much information up front - balance freeing a user from having to enter new information with the need to fill out a long list of questions.

  2. Fallout from the system being down or being under heavy traffic

    1. Ensure that the system under investigation fails gracefully when there is downtime or diminished capacity.

Unauthorized Access

There are ways to make links single-use, which certain services have implemented, but many have not. This is a medium-difficulty ask, though depends on the system. The benefits of this are significant, in that they save people time when they would otherwise show up for an appointment they are not eligible for.

outages and downtime
common user interface issues