Appointments in North Rhine-Westphalia: Better allocation of vaccination appointments-Thanks ServiceNow

ServiceNow has already proposed a vaccine management solution based on the Now platform at the end of January. Even so, about 100 organizations are still experimenting with the solution, including the Scottish National Health Service, NHS, which helped develop the solution. They use ServiceNow’s vaccine management as a tool for scheduling vaccination appointments, and they have done it very successfully.

In Germany, the results of the first few months were mixed. Whether it is more due to insufficient supply of vaccines or due to poor timing has caused a lot of discussion. However, making an appointment with the right technology is not necessarily a problem, as this fact was first demonstrated by Saxony and more recently in the Westphalian-Lipp region of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Shortly before Easter, North Rhine-Westphalia provided an additional 450,000 doses of vaccine from AstraZeneca in a short period of time. The country provides contingents for citizens over 60 years of age. In the Westphalia-Lippe region, the Westphalia-Lippe Statutory Health Insurance Physician Association and its industry partners T-Systems and ServiceNow made an appointment. As expected, the rush of vaccination appointments is huge.

The new appointment booking portal was launched at 9 am on the Saturday before Easter. In just two hours, 120,000 people registered and accepted appointments. There were 168,000 people at noon on Sunday. By Sunday night, about 10,000 of them had been vaccinated. The booking portal peaks at 7,000 hits per second and 5,000 appointments per minute. On Tuesday morning after Easter, the portal made 80,000 appointments for people over 79 years old. The server withstood the shock: the user had to wait up to three minutes to successfully book.

The back-end technology is provided by T-Systems and ServiceNow, who have successfully completed the same task in Saxony. “The vaccination process should be as simple as ordering food from a delivery service,” emphasized Detlef Krause, Vice President of ServiceNow Europe, Middle East and Africa Center and General Manager of Germany. “We have solutions in this area, and in cooperation with T-Systems in Germany, we have the right partners, so it can work the way it should.”

Like Saxony, T-Systems is the main partner of the local authorities, in this case the Westphalian-Lipper Statutory Health Insurance Physician Association. “North Rhine-Westphalia has benefited from our positive experience on the Saxony vaccination portal,” adds Peter Lorenz, who is in charge of T-Systems digital solutions. “We have prepared for a large number of users, so that people will not be frustrated when making appointments. The portal demonstrates its capabilities.”

Vaccine management is based on ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), which provides customers with many self-service functions on desktop and mobile devices. The solution connects patient communications with the vaccine inventory system so that organizations can easily notify patients when more vaccines are available, schedule appointments, and send reminders.

For large companies that want to provide trouble-free vaccinations for their employees, this solution is gradually becoming interesting. With this solution, you can link all relevant data with each other and combine the tasks of a single application into the overall workflow, including scheduling, prioritization, and communication.

ServiceNow’s digital workflow connects the company’s existing technology infrastructure and provides a dashboard to coordinate key elements of the vaccine management process, including:

• Vaccine distribution: Track vaccine shipments, manage inventory, and monitor inventory to help prioritize populations.

• Vaccine management: Arrange vaccine managers and support personnel to monitor personal protective equipment (PPE) and non-appearances, and collect feedback. Employees can communicate with their vaccine suppliers through the channels of their choice.

• Monitor vaccination results: Monitoring the safety of recipients, reporting incidents and supporting efforts to return to work safely, and ongoing public health surveillance.

In addition, ServiceNow launched a safe workplace application last year, which companies can use to bring employees back to the workplace safely.