Contributor: Tim Nolan, Applications Manager, Collin County
Introduction
The moment we all waited for – the vaccine is here – providing a sense of comfort, relief, and a light at the end of the tunnel. Citizens everywhere are ready. The federal government provided the vaccines and funds to manage distribution to state and local governments. Most communities face the challenge of requesting, tracking, and distributing information and the vaccine itself.
The old saying, “a goal without a plan is just a wish,” holds true to this important response to the pandemic. When Tim Nolan, applications manager at Collin County, Texas, received the call on Christmas Eve to create a vaccine waitlist, that saying is what came to mind. What started as a simple waitlist request, resulted in a streamlined process that needed to go-live extremely fast – the sooner, the better.
Collin County includes 18 municipalities and just over one-million citizens. Nolan and the Collin County IT department instantly knew their content services platform, Laserfiche, could handle this challenge. The team developed the process and went live just five days later!
He contributes the rapid response to the scalability of their Laserfiche system and the team’s deep knowledge of its capabilities.
The Process
Citizens visit the Collin County website for a centralized location for the latest information and waiting list options.
They then can request to get added to the waitlist by completing an electronic form:
Collin County serviced thousands of requests per hour in the first few days after the waitlist went live. They faced a surging number of requests from citizens inquiring about where they were in line. Their nimble team quickly served up the ability to search to the waitlist allowing citizens to monitor their waitlist ranking and communicate the most updated information via automated emails, texts, and phone calls.
The search results will either yield a “No Match Found” or the “Current Status” results with directions to take for next steps.
Since the vaccine process went live, the County processed 275,000 vaccine requests from citizens – and it continues to grow. Collin County continues to lead with innovation by working with private testing and vaccination providers to collaborate on the wait-listing, communication, and second-dosage needs.
A content services platform (CSP) allows you to operate, respond, and serve your citizens or customers with a modern, digital experience, while the back-end operations are automated with workflow and document management, records retention, and advanced analytics – all while maintaining HIPAA and DoD security requirements.
