Appointment management Patient flow management

Why and how to choose a COVID-19 vaccine scheduling solution?

Doug Caines |April 28 2021 | 5 min

Currently, in my role as a Healthcare Practice Lead, my focus is on implementing COVID-19 vaccine scheduling solutions. The ability to have a real impact on lives through our solutions is something I take a lot of pride in, and in this article, I'll clarify why and how you can choose a solution to improve your vaccination.

Why do I need a COVID-19 vaccine scheduling solution?

With the limited and ever-changing supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the only way to safely and efficiently control the demand patterns is to schedule appointments with patients. By planning appointments, you can match the supply of vaccines with the number of patients on-site. Meanwhile, you can improve your staff's work environment as you can plan resources based on the expected workload.

Enabling appointment scheduling is one crucial feature, but it's far from the only one. While many tend to focus on the booking function itself, the importance of how to manage patients upon arrival is often overlooked.

The main reason why you need a COVID-19 vaccination scheduling solution is that you need to move patients seamlessly throughout their entire journey from pre-arrival to post-serving.

With a COVID-19 vaccination scheduling solution, you ensure efficient patient flow management. By reducing physical touchpoints and promoting social distancing, you can provide the safest environment possible for your patients.

Below are some examples of features within a COVID-19 vaccination scheduling solution that help you achieve a safe and efficient vaccination.

Residents can schedule appointments online or via phone call
The solution handles booking confirmation, reminders, and notification automatically
Upon arrival, patients check-in via SMS/email, QR code, or through a staff member with a mobile check-in app
Patients can wait remotely and safe with their mobile ticket

How to choose a COVID-19 vaccine scheduling solution?

I think there are four essential questions that all healthcare providers, who are planning to roll out COVID-19 vaccinations, need to ask themselves:

How do we communicate newly available appointments to the population and the process for scheduling an appointment?
What will the patient flow look like from site to site? For example, will we use a drive-thru, physical line, large waiting areas, is there an ability to wait in the car or outside the facility, etc.?
Will we administer vaccines from various manufacturers at the same sites?
If so, what's the plan for keeping the vaccines separated from each other?

By answering these questions, you'll better understand your requirements when choosing a COVID-19 vaccine scheduling solution.

You need to overcome many challenges to succeed in vaccinating a large population as quickly as possible. Below, I share some tips about what I think are essential to consider before investing in a solution.

Providers knowledge and experience

Do the solution providers understand your patient journey issues, and do they have experience in solving the challenges?

Possibility to integrate systems

Are you able to integrate other systems with the COVID-19 vaccine scheduling solution?

Business intelligence

Will you gain insights through data and intelligence? Does the solution include a real-time management dashboard and reporting of demand patterns and quality? This is data you can use to anticipate and optimize staff distribution and get insights into how well you perform to improve your service and operations.

Watch the demo of Qmatic's vaccine scheduling solution.

Do you want to learn more about our COVID-19 vaccination scheduling solution? Click the bottom below to watch a demo, which covers the four main steps in the vaccination process: