One such company is Skedulo, which sells cloud-based software that clients use for scheduling and task management.
The California-based firm has gotten into the business of vaccine scheduling for local and state governments, providing an example of changes taking place in the public-sector technology market during COVID-19.
Prior to the pandemic, no more than 6 percent of the company’s business came from the private sector, Skedulo CEO Matt Fairhurst told Government Technology. Those clients included cities, state parks and recreation departments, he said.
Since the pandemic, Skedulo has done about 15 percent of its business with the public sector, and Fairhurst expects that to keep growing, in large part because of the shift to remote work during lockdowns.
“There are so many use cases and applications for this technology,” he said.
For the past year, Skedulo has worked with California, Maine, North Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, the Canadian province of Ontario, and the country of New Zealand on providing software for vaccine scheduling. The company said that as booster shoots have become more widespread, it expects that growth to continue. The company also intends to promote its software to keep track of other vaccinations, such as for the flu.
“Prior to 2021, the public sector wasn’t a huge focus for our company,” Fairhurst said.
He said that as the pandemic raged, Skedulo reached out to private-sector lab professionals to learn more about how the company could help with vaccine management.
“All these ad-hoc labs and testing situations were falling apart,” he recalled. “With hundreds of millions of people, it becomes incredibly complex, and we foresaw the need for this, and governments started coming to us. It was definitely the hardest I ever worked, but it was rewarding.”
Skedulo’s appointment tool sends text and email reminders to people participating in the vaccination program, allows pre- and post-shot surveys, can scan vaccine labels and is designed to handle hundreds of thousands of daily appointments.
Skedulo is hardly alone in seeking more revenue from this part of the government technology world, of course. Microsoft and Google are among the giants seeking to sign up more public-sector clients for vaccination management and scheduling programs, and multiple platforms and apps stand ready to take on such tasks.
Indeed, the use of fresh or repurposed technology to help governments schedule and manage vaccines is highlighting the roles that data analytics and visualization can play in the public sector, according to Tableau Software. Meanwhile, cybersecurity is also emerging as an important factor in these vaccination efforts, reflecting larger concerns among public agencies.
The market for this type of technology seems all but certain to grow, given how the Biden administration is pressing for more funding related to COVID-19, including billions more for vaccines.
As that happens, local and regional governments in the U.S. and abroad are spending more on vaccine management tools. The Australian state of Victoria, for instance — where Skedulo is already active — reportedly will now spend some $18 million on Microsoft software to continue to manage vaccinations. That’s double what the state initially planned to spend and comes with a six-month contract extension.
As for Skedulo — like so many other companies trying to gain a bigger foothold in government technology — the prospects for growth come with hard lessons.
“One surprise — and it probably should not have been — is that government is just massive and navigating it is complex,” Fairhurst said. “I think we are still learning about how to engage with governments.”
