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Tackling the Challenges of COVID-19 Vaccine Management with Unqork

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Quickly and effectively distributing COVID-19 vaccines to over 330 million Americans is a Herculean task, but one that no-code can make easier.

After almost a full year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the approval of multiple COVID-19 vaccines, it appeared that there might be light at the end of the tunnel. While the early months of 2021 have seen the distribution and administration of an initial wave of vaccine doses across the United States—a promising development, certainly—the rollout has been bumpier than many municipalities and organizations expected or were prepared for. 

Most evidently, aggregating and coordinating data from pharmaceutical manufacturers, state and federal governments, third-party storage and transportation providers, distribution centers, and vaccine recipients—all under a ticking clock—is a logistical nightmare. To rise to this Herculean task, government agencies and healthcare organizations need streamlined digital solutions that are closely tailored to the unique challenges of COVID-19 vaccine management.

The Complex Logistics of Vaccine Distribution

Now that the hard work of developing and approving a vaccine has been completed, distributing the vaccine to the general public is the major remaining hurdle. Unfortunately, this hurdle is proving to be quite high, and over two dozen states are already nearing the end of their vaccine reserves.

“When the impact is so substantial, even seemingly minor hiccups have an outsized effect on both the fidelity of the experience and the administrative burden that comes along with it,” explained Unqork’s Olya Ossipova. “This was demonstrated by some of the very public scheduling mishaps in some of the vaccine management solutions out there.”

While U.S. healthcare organizations are scrambling to deliver some 500 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the complex logistics of doing so have made it difficult for many states to meet the overwhelming demand they are facing. Even if a state has enough vaccines to go around, the vaccines can be rendered unusable by delays in the last mile of an overly complicated and disorganized supply chain and scheduling limitations. Some hospitals have had to throw away vaccine doses because they expired shortly after they were taken out of cold storage, while other vaccine reserves have gone unused because there was confusion about who should get them first (and when).

 

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These challenges have resulted in slow rollouts, disappointing vaccination rates, and costly mistakes. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott recently tweeted about vaccine doses “sitting on hospital shelves as opposed to being given to vulnerable Texans,” and, in West Virginia, 42 people were accidentally given a monoclonal antibody treatment instead of a COVID-19 vaccine. As of writing, only seven out of every 100 people in the U.S. have been vaccinated, and NBC News analysis estimates that, at this rate, it would take almost a decade to vaccinate enough people to control the spread of the pandemic.

The Digital Solutions Governments and Healthcare Organizations Need

To optimize vaccination efforts and coordinate logistics, government agencies and healthcare organizations need robust digital solutions that can help them scale vaccine administration, notification, and scheduling processes. However, trying to build a vaccination management platform that meets these requirements using traditional development methods would be prohibitively expensive, incredibly complicated, and simply too slow.

The average large-scale IT project runs 45% over budget and 7% over schedule, and overwhelmed organizations with dwindling funding can’t afford to incur such expenses and delays. What’s more, a code-based approach makes it difficult to adapt to evolving factors like changing guidelines, newly approved vaccines, updated eligibility requirements, and so forth.

With Unqork, healthcare organizations, hospitals, and government agencies can rapidly build and effectively manage a custom COVID-19 Vaccination Platform in a matter of weeks.

In light of these realities, to tackle COVID-19 vaccine management more effectively, government agencies and healthcare organizations need an enterprise no-code platform.

Building a Custom COVID-19 Vaccination Management Platform with Unqork

With Unqork, healthcare organizations, hospitals, and government agencies can rapidly build and effectively manage a custom COVID-19 Vaccination Platform in a matter of weeks. Intuitive visual tools and drag-and-drop components make it easy to build a sophisticated and secure enterprise-grade application without getting bogged down in legacy code. A custom vaccine management solution can help you:

  • Speed up the patient registration and scheduling process and remove redundancies.

  • Automatically discern vaccine eligibility based on configurable guidelines.

  • Manage shifts and processes at multiple vaccination sites by consolidating information in a single dashboard.

  • Support patients with real-time notifications and self-guided functionalities.

  • Keep track of supplies to ensure an equitable distribution of vaccines that protects vulnerable communities.

  • Coordinate with third-party services for verification using automated workflows.

  • Scale to meet the needs of specific vaccine initiatives.

When you build with Unqork no-code, your life-saving application can be ready to deploy faster than you ever imagined. An application that would take five-to-12 months to build using traditional code can be completed in as little as two months using no-code, giving you the time and flexibility to respond to rapidly changing requirements and get ahead of supply chain bottlenecks.

  • Click here to read about “The 9 HealthTech Trends That Will Shape 2021″

When President Biden recently spoke about the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, he called it “the greatest operational challenge we’ve ever faced as a nation.” Luckily, no-code can help. By boosting operational efficiency, fostering collaboration between parties, and giving administrators, healthcare professionals, and government leaders what they need to succeed, enterprise-grade no-code solutions will be key to ensuring everyone gets vaccinated as quickly as possible.

To learn more about how the Unqork platform can revolutionize the healthcare industry and help support local and federal governments, check out our related articles in the Unqork resource library. Also, sign-up for the Unqork newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest in the world of no-code.

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