IT teams work at scale all the time supporting thousands of users. Workflow optimization is often a goal for new systems. The mass vaccination sites and events are at scale and depend on an optimized, efficient workflow. With over 2 million doses a day being administered now in the U.S., these sites and events are becoming more prevalent and will continue over the next several months. While there was much publicity of the problems in the vaccine rollout early on, there have been many improvements in the tools to find vaccine locations and schedule appointments, and the administering of shots. In part that has been due to improved technology and better workflow design.

Two health systems doing mass vaccination sites/events have shared their playbooks in recent weeks for others to learn from. UCHealth in Denver is offering a playbook, “COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Drive-Through Playbook”. It is a 59 page comprehensive and very detailed playbook covering organizational structure and partner involvement, pre-event planning, contingency planning, patient communication, staff, provider and agency recruitment, vaccine storage and handling, and media communications. The Atrium Health playbook is a higher-level guide for leaders – “A Leader’s Guide to Safer, Faster and More Equitable Community Vaccination Events”. Both are valuable tools whether you are in the planning stage or tweaking your current operation.

To build on these tools, I recommend checking out two recent interviews that Bill Russell did at This Week in Health IT.

Sarah White, Senior Director, Innovation and Health Systems Engineering, at UCHealth talked with Bill about their successful events at Coors Field in Denver. In the interview, “The UCHealth COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Playbook”, she describes how they were able to move 834 cars through per hour with 22.4 minutes per car (including the 15-minute observation period) and have zero unused doses at the end of the day. The podcast link for audio only is here.

Becky Fox, VP, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, at Atrium Health talked to Bill from the Bank of America stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina where they are vaccinating 14,000 people in one week. They have also had mass vaccination events at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.  In the interview, “Nursing Informatics and Its Role in Mass Vaccination”, she covers the logistics involved in these vaccination events and the informatics lessons for clinical settings. The podcast link for audio only is here.

Even if you are not involved in or planning a mass vaccination site or event, you may find these resources broadly useful. They are great examples of logistics planning and system design thinking.

Kudos to both organizations for their continued efforts to get as many shots in arms as fast as possible and for sharing their playbooks and lessons learned with the rest of the healthcare community. And thanks to Bill for amplifying their work through these insightful interviews.

After all, sharing best practices and learning from one another is what we do in healthcare.