TASBIA

The Appointment Scheduling and Booking Industry Association

COVID-19 Vaccination Appointment Scheduling: Making it Better

COVID-19 Vaccination Appointment Scheduling: How Reserve with Google Can Make it Better

How “Reserve with Google” Can Streamline COVID-19 Vaccination Appointment Scheduling

We are facing a worldwide crisis in rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine, with glitches and confusion nationwide.

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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced a $150 million effort to promote vaccine education and equitable access. He noted that searches for “vaccines near me” have increased 5x since the beginning of the year, and Google wants to provide locally relevant answers. So, in the coming weeks, COVID-19 vaccination locations will be available in Google Search and Maps, starting with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, with more states and countries to come.

This is a great start. However, providing information about sites but only saying that “an appointment is required” is not enough. Google should use the power of their existing “Reserve with Google” solution to provide real appointment scheduling and not just information.

Google is uniquely suited to do this on a worldwide basis.

We’ve Got a Problem

In the U.S., the Phase 1 program began in December 2020 with individual hospitals, regions, counties, and states scrambling to provide vaccinations. In many cases, appointment websites and call centers have been overwhelmed.

  • California’s 58 counties are a hodgepodge of different technical systems and varying vaccine eligibility requirements. Los Angeles and Orange counties authorized mass vaccination to give shots to those over 65, while San Francisco relies largely on hospital systems to vaccinate only patients 75 and older. Riverside County filled all 10,000 available time slots in 32 minutes, with other users getting “error screens.”
  • In New York City, users complained that both websites available for booking vaccination appointments were “buggy” and one required too much information.
  • Some locations have “paused” appointment scheduling altogether due to overloaded systems. Others have avoided offering appointments at all, and instead are opting to vaccinate people on a first come, first served basis. Seniors and health care workers have lined up in cars and on sidewalks in Los Angeles, Arizona, Washington D.C., Florida, Tennessee, and Puerto Rico.
  • Leftover vaccines from no-show appointments have been provided ad-hoc to those who “happened to be in the right place at the right time” in stores, pharmacies and hospitals.
  • Scheduling an appointment to receive the second required vaccination has been problematic. Some locations have taken to using 2nd doses as 1st doses to alleviate shortages.

Where appointment systems are being used, some have been re-purposed from other areas not intended for the vaccination use case. For example, Walgreens requires that a user have a “Walgreens Account” in order to get vaccinated. Requiring that a user “register for an account” with irrelevant questions is an unnecessary hurdle.

As we get to Phases 2 and 3 when tens of millions of people will require vaccinations a massively scaled effort will be needed. The vaccination program must be truly national in scope, easy to use, and provide access to the vaccine in a fair way. (Equitable access is critical for public trust – a subject of another blog article coming shortly.)

What Type of Appointment Scheduling do we Need?

Here are the requirements as I see them:

  • The appointment system should be scalable, flexible, and powerful.
  • It should not require pre-registration, or require a user to be a “member” of any particular health plan, local store or pharmacy chain.
  • Any qualifying criteria (e.g., 65 or older) should be provided to users at the start of the process, and extraneous questions should be avoided.
  • The appointment system should allow flexibility to each location with respect to logistics, staff availability, vaccine stock, and allow easily definable workflows and hours of service. The solution could also manage “population slicing” to avoid overloads, for example, rolling out to 90-year olds first and then lowering age ranges over time.
  • On the front end, users should be able to easily schedule a “confirmed second appointment” if required.
  • The system should include analytics providing a global view, allowing planning and forecasting, which could help with vaccine distribution strategies.

Reserve with Google is the Overarching Solution

The most important element of an appointment scheduling solution is making it easy for every U.S. resident to find a nearby vaccination location and schedule an appointment in a few clicks.

Given that the majority of people search “vaccines near me” on Google, we need a system that is already available. Google could offer appointments immediately by using the existing Reserve With Google capabilities.

  • Reserve with Google has been around since 2017. It already has a mature interface for scheduling across a variety of industries. Google Reserve is not an appointment scheduling system in itself, but a “gateway” to over 140 vendors who have integrated their own solutions.
  • The beauty of Reserve with Google is that it can handle all the work of showing nearby vaccination centers and available appointments, but still allow each center to customize the types of appointments available. For example, a location that only offers Healthcare Workers or First Responder appointments could show those appointment types.
  • As importantly, Reserve with Google accommodates existing appointment scheduling systems via its Application Programming Interface (API), which is relatively easy to implement. Appointment vendors can publish their appointments both to Reserve with Google and still keep their existing interface (for example, to be used within a call center).

We can still promote a national website URL and provide an 800-number, which is especially important for non-computer users. But when it comes to serving a large number of people, Reserve with Google can play a critical role.

The TASBIA™ Bottom Line

We need a combination of public policy that balances public health goals and solutions which are accessible, easy to use, and fair. We are only at the beginning of providing the COVID-19 vaccine to our entire population, with more than 95% of people still needing vaccinations. The federal government has prioritized production and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, but supply and distribution are only part of the solution.

The good news, there is technology today that can handle tens of millions of appointments. And, with Reserve with Google as the umbrella solution, these systems can be made available easily through Google Search and Maps. I’m hopeful that Google and our COVID-19 Task Force will work together to quickly enable a universal solution.

—Cimarron Buser, TASBIA™ CEO


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