Akamai Helps You Get a Vaccine Appointment for Grandma

As soon as it was available, my grandmother wanted to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The problem was, she’s 87 and has never used a computer in her life. She came to me, the digital-native, Gen Z/millennial who works at a tech company to help her get one. I searched and searched. I went through loophole after loophole to no avail. I tried my damndest to get one for her, but could not -- for the life of me -- find an open slot for her to get the jab. She ended up calling the pharmacy helpline on the back of her prescription and in 10 minutes she got an appointment after four hours of pulling out my hair.

If this proves one thing (aside from what a phone call from an adorable old lady can get you) it’s that getting a COVID-19 vaccine is hard. Bulky registration processes, overloaded systems, and appointment scarcity combined with complex systems and a priority on more susceptible age groups means that state and local governments have their work cut out for them.

I’d even argue that the equitable and fair distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is one of the biggest challenges state and local governments will come up against this year.

My grandmother’s experience is one that is painfully familiar to others as well. People known as “vaccine angels” or “vaccine hunters” have stepped up to help others find spots or information, but their efforts can only go so far.

There's an obstacle on the backend as well: overloaded servers. When citizens go to their local government’s web page in search of a vaccine appointment, their requests to origin burden that system with traffic it’s not equipped to handle. Users refresh and refresh, weighing down and eventually crashing the page, leaving the website inoperable, and citizens frustrated. This is familiar terrain for shopping, gaming and streaming sites when new shows air or products drop -- it is imperative to be ready to meet these increases.

This happened not too long ago in Washington D.C. As reported by USA today, “The city's vaccination portal was down over the weekend, unable to handle a surge as more than 36,000 people tried to get access to 4,300 appointments, according to a tweet by Lindsey Parker, chief technology officer for the D.C. government.”

Managing this wave of traffic to your vaccine site is essential to be able to provide for the equitable distribution of the vaccine. Akamai can help. Our Vaccine Edge solution allows you to offload cached content and accelerate non-cacheable requests from your infrastructure with our globally distributed Edge Platform. In plain English, this means that we reroute the traffic so your servers don’t get bogged down with requests, helping to keep your website afloat. (For a more technical explanation, check out this blog from Akamai Advisory CISO Steve Winterfeld.)

When you use Vaccine Edge, you also get a waiting room with branding unique to your agency. For your constituents, the waiting room engages by providing a personalized page with their place in the queue, estimated wait time, and information about the program. When it’s their turn, they’ll automatically be placed in the scheduling application.

This, combined with top-tier security (against scalper bots booking up appointments and increased ransomware attacks), alleviates the challenges of vaccine appointment sites crashing and citizens’ frustrations with being unable to schedule one.

Take Penn State Health for example:

In February, Penn State Health, like most Pennsylvania health systems, was officially designated to help with Commonwealth’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout.  A directive from the Department of Health tasked vaccine providers with establishing a scheduling website—making it easy for members of the general public to sign up. With little time to deliver the site, Penn State Health found the turnkey solution it needed with a full-featured, easy-to-use website built on Salesforce Experience Cloud and bolstered by Akamai’s Vaccine Edge. Adding performance and security, Vaccine Edge helps ensure that the scheduling experience is smooth and orderly, even when tens of thousands of people are accessing the site all at once. The solution places people in a virtual waiting room, which shows their place in the queue and an estimated waiting time, until it’s their turn to schedule an appointment. By partnering with Salesforce and Akamai, Penn State Health successfully rolled out its vaccination program, vaccinating more than 1,400 people on the first day alone. [Data pulled from here: Penn State Health launches public vaccination process | Penn State University (psu.edu)]

Cletis Earle, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Penn State Health says it best: “Penn State Health needed to make sure that vaccination scheduling would be a good experience for people. With enormous demand for vaccines and intense public scrutiny, we knew we could not fail to deliver. The fact that we rolled out vaccines without any significant problems speaks volumes for the Vaccine Edge solution and the work Akamai did to support us.”

Thank you Cletis.

We know how you feel. Standing up your site in the midst of a crisis isn’t easy - it’s overwhelming and stressful. You need a partner to rely on and one that works quickly to achieve a solution that works for you. Vaccine Edge can be implemented in hours -- not days -- so your staff can focus on the bigger things, like matching citizen arms with available vaccines -- because when your website works, citizens like my grandmother get vaccinated.

For more information on Vaccine Edge, please contact us at vaccineedge@akamai.com.