Vaccine megasites are popping up in the parking lots of stadiums and the vacant halls of convention centers, to name a few, in efforts to get vaccines to as many people as possible. These makeshift workstations rely on cloud computing and software platforms to make it possible, according to a March 22 article published in The Wall Street Journal.
Legacy technology that many healthcare organizations use has been known to cause glitches in vaccine scheduling and administration, Dr. Shafiq Rab, chief digital officer and CIO at Burlington, Mass.-based healthcare group Wellforce, told the Journal.
Dr. Rab said many healthcare organizations discovered that the IT infrastructure they had could not handle the capacity it needed to.
Here are three ways vaccine sites lean on enterprise technology for a smooth rollout:
- Mobilizing cloud systems
These makeshift facilities run on large-scale networks that need to be both secure and scalable. These sites need to draw on the home base's data center, which requires elasticity to quickly expand operations. Enterprise tech has been used to mobilize cloud systems for healthcare groups. - Pop-up connectivity
In areas that don't have reliable network coverage, IT teams have to set up connectivity hubs using a cellular router so vaccine administrators can access cloud systems throughout the workstation. Vaccine sites across the U.S. are expanding network coverage to parking lots to the deepest corners of vacant buildings. - Mass texting to schedule vaccine appointments
To mitigate the frustration of vaccine appointment scheduling glitches, some healthcare organizations can now automatically send eligible patients a text or email whenever a vaccine appointment has become available.