Some of the major cloud companies in the world are stepping in to facilitate state and local healthcare activities, to improve the process of vaccination campaigns across the globe as millions of people are getting vaccinated each week. Amazon Inc., Google, and Microsoft Corp. have already launched their own cloud-based platforms and apps in the last few weeks, that are built to deal with the challenges in setting up the scheduling of COVID-19 vaccination.
Appointment booking websites and call centers are the most preferred ways at most of the places for sign-up and to collect required data by the authorities. The digital tools used in the process include an enhanced version of booking or scheduling apps for COVID-19 tests launched in 2020. Many of the recently developed applications are based on enterprise information technology apps, such as Business Management and Communications Software. Some applications include automated virtual voice assistancebased call centers, that use natural language processing technology that is developed a few years ago for familiar virtual assistance.
Digital services offered by the public sector is struggling to handle heavy traffic on their platform and sudden surges in demand for online bookings for testing or vaccination purpose. This sudden increase in web traffic has crashed many websites and has also jammed phone lines, as more people raced to use available options for them. Most of the websites made for public services are initially developed by technical teams, that are working for technical assistance and maintenance purposes at the health department or any local government body. But the sudden increase in demand for the service made it hard for the teams to tackle the situation and with this, other pharmacy chains are also suffering similar glitches.
“Vaccination in the US and India are running at a pace of around 3 million a day over the past few weeks. But many digital platforms fell short in handling the demand to register tens and even hundreds of thousands of bookings, while integrating existing software and database that can support different steps of a process”, says Todd Schroeder, director of digital strategy at Google Cloud. Recently, Google has launched a special-purpose system for scheduling the vaccination as a part of its cloud services. Among many features, it provides virtual call center agents with the use of artificial intelligence technology, that can decide the vaccine eligibility of the callers and get them signed up on the system and schedule the appointments. The system that is designed as a response service is available in 28 different languages and dialects. It also handles onboarding and pre-screening along with location detection with the help of Google maps.
The public sector is getting assistance from tech-based companies, to speed up the process of vaccination drive with of automated data gathering system, which speeds up the entire check-in process. As the data is getting stores in the cloud, the volume of data collected and compiled at each step isn’t hampering the speed of execution. Google’s system has so far been implemented for more than 37 million people in New York State alone. Amazon has also developed a similar system which is handling the registrations on phone lines. Developing the news app from the scratch is not what a typical government authority is equipped to do, hence the cloud-based services are proving themselves as a backbone for mass vaccination.
