Employer
Location
Timeline
My role
Team
Virginia Department of Health
Virtual
4 months
Service systems designer, website designer
5 IT & data managers, Gov. Office representatives
State of Virginia
COVID-19 Vaccine
Pre-Registration Systems Design
When the COVID-19 vaccine first became available, many health departments across the country implemented vaccine (pre) registration lists to buffer an unpredictable supply/demand curve and to appease public concern. However, few systems existed to automate registration list management, resulting in widely varied, often opaque, and sometimes redundant sign up tools.
In Virginia alone, a total of 1.8 million pre-registration records were collected in January and February by the state's 35 Health Districts in over 60 separate online registration tools, each with varying resident information and discrete data sets. Of the many challenges that arose from this scenario, the most urgent was vaccine clinic scheduling: even with surveys that created excel files, appoints still had to be filled manually - a process that was rapidly become non-viable as vaccination campaigns scaled.
At the end of January, I joined a team of five data managers and IT specialists from the Virginia Department of Health and the Governor's Office, tasked with developing a statewide vaccination pre-registration system in four weeks - and managing it until supply exceeded demand when it would no longer be needed.
Project summary
Problems to be solved:
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Manual vaccine clinic scheduling & pre-registration list management could not scale: The stop-gap solutions worked for initial phase of vaccine rollout, but lists soon grew to contain hundreds of thousands of records.
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Data was incomplete and difficult to locate: Without single database or one that pulled from all systems, assessing real-time needs and status updates was prohibitively time consuming.
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Public trust in the state's vaccine emergency response was eroding: With lack of clarity and widespread inconsistencies surrounding vaccine pre-registration, residents were increasingly vocalizing their questions and concerns.
Context & constraints:
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Abbreviated timelines / urgent needs: The initial development to launch timeline was less than four weeks, followed by a 1-week launch cycle thereafter for systems improvements.
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Complex dependencies: The number of institutions, departments and IT / data systems that were implicated in this project made for challenging coordination and required meticulous ongoing communication.
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Public visibility: Given the pandemic's impact, this was par for the course; a good thing when improvements were successful, but also a liability that required planning.
Project goals:
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Increase efficiency in vaccine clinic scheduling.
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Improve data quality and decrease data delays.
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Build trust with residents by improving public service provision.
Process steps:​
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Rapid needs assessment / design research: I conducted interviews with health district staff to map current pre-registration and clinic scheduling processes, pain points, needs, wins, and blue skies scenarios. The findings established baseline requirements for the system we were about to build.
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Process & systems design alongside database and dashboard development: Co-created a comprehensive end-to-end process diagram for the project - combining elements of systems diagrams, customary journey maps and service blueprints. The diagram was used to present the new product to a variety of audiences, and to continue to design improvements after it launched.
Original plan for the new system, containing a customer service journey from pre-registration to the second vaccination dose, and data/process flows between multiple stakeholders and platforms.
The same, with overlays that identify system components and functions.
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Database / dashboard development: After finalizing the draft of the initial system, I shifted my focus back the the local health departments. The next step was connecting the data / backend development teams with each health district to facilitate importing exiting pre-registration records into the new Database.
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Staff training: Our team Lead provided the initial (virtual) trainings to staff across the agency, after which I offered them on an ongoing basis. We also created a user guide for the Dashboard.
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Website design: The pre-registration data collection form was hosted on a separe platform, but constituents would need to navigate to it from the Health Department website. With content provided by the Governor's Office and branding guidelines that were in use for print materials, I designed a landing page that linked to the form.
Landing page design from initial concept to completion
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Go live: Given its size and complexity, this project would have greatly benefited from a longer onramp. Being emergency response work, we launched as it was still being built.
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Weekly launch cycle improvements: Maintained a 1-week launch cycle for improvements and new features, as circumstances and needs changed so rapidly during early vaccine rollout.
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Vaccine supply meets demand: Pre-registering for the vaccine is eventually no longer necessary, and the system is no longer required.
Launch day! Governor Northam holds a press conference to announce the new system
Solution & impact:
In less than four weeks, we developed and launched a statewide COVID-19 Vaccine Pre-Registration System. The product replaced over 60 locality-specific pre-registration forms, and consolidated 1.8 million records that were previously collected into its database. The database pulled additional data from other systems used in the pandemic response, and pushed to a dashboard from which lists of pre-registrants could be curated and downloaded for vaccine clinic scheduling. Complete with interactive visual displays, the near real-time data could easily be queried and filtered for swift data analysis, and was used to guide strategic planning and to provide updates to stakeholders.
The pre-registration form where Virginia residents continue to sign up for the vaccine
The dashboard that provided real time data analysis and downloads for clinic scheduling.
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Unexpected challenges:
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tech constraints - no CRM - remaining challenge to track
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launch cycle feedback loop - premature launches / “fails” (like pre MVP)
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I could have instead: chose not start over for database holy data nightmare- won’t do that again!
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Unexpected wins: xxx,
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With more resources we could have: start it 6 months prior to needing it. always putting out fires, we needed to look ahead. also needed time to add CRM fx
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Next steps: xxx
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Final take-home: important to
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n short, we did just that, but not without numerous hurdles throughout development and implementation. However, for what the project lacked in ease, it made up for in 'lessons learned' - most notably that even in crises when time is a scare commodity, it is critically important to preserve some of it for strategic planning; and, that downstream success usually requires upstream choices that are often not the easiest option available.
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Wins, losses, learnings:
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OR do them like the exampe!
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Surprising win: xxxy
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Unexpected hurdle: xxx
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With more ______ we would have... xxx. ​
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Key insights?
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Most valuable learning: xx