The vaccination process around the world has had certain difficulties, particularly at the pharmacy level. Vaccination appointments can be missed or canceled. When this happens, there is a finite amount of time until the vaccine doses intended for those appointments are no longer viable. This leads to waste and prolongs the current public health situation, as well as costs money. In order to combat this, patients can be reached out to as part of a vaccine uptake strategy. Unfortunately, such a strategy is currently undertaken manually.
What this means, is that as an appointment is voided for one reason or another, the pharmacy staff pick up the phone, refer to a waitlist, and make calls until the doses are received by another patient, or become nonviable. Being able to contact more people in a shorter time span and know for sure that those doses were administered would be the ideal situation. This scenario is achievable through the use of an automated vaccine uptake solution.
An automated solution would send out a message to everyone signed up for the waitlist, prioritized by proximity and their status as a member of vulnerable populations. When enough people have responded, it would decline any further responses, thank them for their time, and send appointment details to the successful respondents. Ideally, the solution should be tied into the main appointment booking and reminder system as well, to ensure everything is being run with the same knowledge and source data.
If this sounds interesting, we have good news. This blog features a step-by-step guide on how to build a similar process to the one above, and the one you’re reading now will tell you how this process can benefit you further.
Without further ado, here are four benefits to running an automated vaccine uptake solution.
Efficiency is key
In a scenario like the current COVID-19 vaccination rush, maximizing the number of successful doses given in the shortest period of time is of utmost importance. Accuracy, however, is equally as important. Things must not fall through the cracks wherever possible and waste should be avoided. Automation will allow pharmacy staff to take some of the pressure off by performing some of their outreach and communication tasks for them. This will allow greater attention to detail in areas that still require human intervention and provide more time for administering doses or undertaking other important tasks. An automated solution can help you achieve this efficiency. With accurate reporting, and the ability to control your data manually at any time, you don’t need to worry or feel that you are giving up control.
Avoid overbooking
With the ability to limit responses to a given call-out, you can make sure that only the number of appointments you need to fill are booked, avoiding the double-booking problem and preventing people from showing up at the pharmacy expecting a vaccination when there are none available.
No synchronization issues
Using separate solutions for regular booking and waitlists could lead to miscommunications, overbooking, or even lost client data. Using the same solution for the entire process including your messaging means that you never have to worry that the wrong messages are being delivered.
Scaling is not a problem
Your solution should be able to adjust depending on your intake. That is to say, with a proper vaccine uptake solution, it doesn’t matter if you’re serving a few hundred people or tens of thousands. No matter how many people you are booking and no matter what circumstances might lead to a rapid influx of people, an automated solution can help manage that.
If these benefits sound like things you need in your pharmacy, don’t hesitate to book a demo now!
Simply request a one-on-one demo with our experts and let us show you our automated vaccine uptake solution!
