UK Technology Met Community Needs For Vaccine Sign Up And Scheduling

From the University of Kentucky:

May 13, 2021

As the University of Kentucky stepped up to meet the challenge of distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the Lexington community, it needed a more sophisticated tool for vaccine sign-ups. Information Technology Services (ITS) worked with UK HealthCare to develop a process that would provide the community with an easy way to request a vaccine appointment and then schedule the date and time for their vaccination once the vaccine was available for them.

Built on UK HealthCare’s established vaccine distribution process for flu shots, the ITS Enterprise Applications division worked to create the vaccine scheduler that would create a unique invitation for a person who requested to receive the vaccine via ukvaccine.org. The unique invitations were crucial for vaccine distribution operations, preventing people from sharing vaccine sign-ups with others.

Another crucial part of vaccine distribution was identifying those groups that were eligible for the vaccine and encouraging them to sign up. The Institutional Research, Analytics, and Decision Support (IRADS) division of ITS connected data from UK HealthCare’s vaccine request system and data from Health Cloud to validate which students, faculty and staff had already gotten the vaccine and who needed to be communicated to about signing up to get the vaccine. By utilizing functionalities in Salesforce, all identified groups at UK received email communications detailing the vaccine request and scheduling process.

UK also provided several layers of support for community mobile clinics which distributed vaccines to the Lexington community. Not only did the ITS Networking & Infrastructure teams make sure there was reliable network at every mobile clinic location, but the Information Services teams also stepped up to distribute devices for check-in operations at every site. The Enterprise CRM & Salesforce team would then queue text messages to go to members of the community informing them about the mobile vaccine clinic. Additionally, ITS also set up a vaccine hotline for those who might have questions or need technical assistance with requesting or scheduling a vaccine.

Vaccine distribution has been one of the most important responses to COVID-19 and essential in keeping our community safe and healthy. Through the efforts of so many at UK, we are one step closer to life without COVID-19.

This press release was produced by the University of Kentucky. The views expressed here are the author’s own.