Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Centralizing, optimizing, and prioritizing distribution of COVID-19 vaccines
“We held our first discovery call during the first day or two in March and had the actual sign-up page launched on Friday, March 12. Thanks to the sheer volume of resources that were brought to bear by the team, our users had a smooth experience using an incredibly stable application.”
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts needed a seamless application to accelerate its sharing of public health information and delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine, so it turned to the expertise of Egen and Google Cloud to deliver a solution quickly.
Given the urgency and time-sensitivity of distributing vaccines to its residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, Massachusetts needed to deploy this solution in less than a week. The state asked Egen and Google Cloud to rapidly build a pre-registration and notification system that could be scaled to support vaccination efforts and efficiently manage the coordination of vaccine appointments.
The experts at Egen created a database alongside App Engine for taking in people’s registrations. The data loaded into BigQuery, where the state could analyze the performance, registration uptake, and vaccination eligibility of people using the system. People who were eligible for vaccination were selected and notified by the Cloud Functions solutions. Eligible people could then identify the vaccination sites closest to them using Google Maps. The solution also helped the state manage appointments among more than seven vaccination sites across Massachusetts.
Delivering on the promise of a rapid turnaround, this vaccine solution was launched within two weeks of the first meeting with Massachusetts and implemented in less than seven days.
This innovative solution allowed more than 400,000 Massachusetts residents to register on the first day, reaching 700,000 residents by the fifth day. Approximately 650,000 people were vaccinated through the new system.
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