Limitations of Technology

While your choice of scheduling system is an important one, it is also important to keep in mind where technology can fall short. Be sure to consider the below factors when evaluating possible solutions:

Tech vs. operations tradeoffs

Operational solutions can be just as valuable as technological ones.

Not all solutions have to be driven by technology. Ruthlessly assess where you need technology to ensure getting shots into people's arms vs where you want technology to ease operational burden. Focus on the simplest way to improve the user experience.

• In cases where automation is proving particularly difficult, it's perfectly acceptable to use manual/people processes to keep things moving. If you're in a low-resource (budget, people, technical capabilities, time to launch, etc.) situation, focusing on the user experience over the backend will be the highest value investment you can make.

• Integration with other systems, especially EMR/EHRs can be difficult. Take a hard look at what you're trying to achieve with those integrations. If there are places where it makes sense to put people processes into place to bridge gaps, and refocus those resources or development efforts on building out an effective and efficient user experience, take advantage of that. For example, if you can get a simple data export -- CSV or otherwise -- of the patients who have received a vaccine from your scheduling system of record and then manually import, or even paste, that into your EHR for billing purposes, you can save your resources for more impactful patient facing work.

Improving communications and automation

This can often pay higher dividends than trying to directly deduplicate individuals between lists.

One frustration we heard from numerous non-centralized jurisdictions was the amount of time spent manually de-deduplicating people between appointment or pre-registration lists. Deduplication of people is a very hard technical problem and it’s even harder and more time intensive to resolve by manually comparing lists. Instead of focusing on this challenege, we recommend focusing on making improvements to other areas that will improve the user experience overall, like:

• Proactive communication about a person’s place is line can improve trust and make people feel less forgotten, and therefore less likely to register multiple times or on multiple lists.

• Automated scheduling outreach - for example with a chatbot that texts individuals about accepting an open appointment time - can quickly get through large lists of people decreasing the impact of people with multiple registrations. At the end of the day, everyone is looking for one appointment, not many (as long as you can't transfer appointments to other people). Once they have that they are unlikely to accept future appointments.