National Covid-19 vaccination booking system ready by end of May

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A national booking system for Covid-19 vaccinations will be ready by the end of May.

The Ministry of Health is using Skedulo, a scheduling plug-in app for Salesforce, which is the platform of the national Covid-19 Immunisation Register and National Contact Tracing Solution.

At a media conference on April 15, deputy director general data and digital Shayne Hunter said the cloud-based system would be able to deal with thousands of people accessing it simultaneously.

He said the Ministry has developed an inventory management system for Covid-19 vaccines, which went live in February and is being iterated on.
  
The MoH is also working with the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring on digitising and modernising their systems for vaccine safety monitoring so that they can scale.
 
Hunter said the Ministry focused initially on getting the immunisation register, inventory management system and vaccine safety monitoring system up and running as the first tranche of vaccinations could be managed using local booking systems at the DHBs.

Last month, Canterbury DHB’s Covid-19 vaccination booking system had to be taken down after a whistle blower detected a security vulnerability in the code.

The national booking system will be in place by the end of May and the Ministry is working with a North and a South Island DHB on co-designing this to ensure it is operationally sound before rolling it out across the country, he said.

The national systems will allow people to pre-register and book an appointment for both the first and second dose that suits them. People will also allow people to have one dose in a different location to another. 

Hunter said the consumer channel, which would allow people to access their own vaccination record, would go-live around June.

He said the Ministry had experience of rapidly building the National Contact Tracing Solution in 2020, but the scale of the vaccination program is “much bigger than we anticipated and certainly larger than what we had to do last year”.

The Ministry team and its partners had spent a lot of time looking at how vaccination programmes had been run overseas and had talked to people in Israel, the US and the UK.

When asked about the technology spend with partners such as Salesforce and AWS, Hunter said, “this is a people and technology game and our spend on technology compared to the rest of it is very small”.

Picture: Director General Ashley Bloomfield at a media panel with Fepulea'i Margie Apa, chief executive of Counties Manukau DHB and Deputy Director-General, Data and Digital Shayne Hunter