Scaling Our Digital Patient Experience Solutions to Serve New York City’s Vaccination Needs
When the first shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine arrived in New York in December 2020, NYU Langone Health (NYULH) had already developed a distribution program to vaccinate our eligible staff and patients in accordance with New York State Department of Health guidelines.
But we knew that helping other New York residents who were not our patients — potentially millions of them — to schedule a vaccine appointment wasn’t going to be easy.
How would we identify those people? How would we contact them? And most importantly, how would we enable them to quickly and easily schedule their vaccine appointments?
That is where my team, Patient Digital Access, came in. We partner across the organization and specifically with our faculty group practice and hospital operations to design and develop patient-centric, digital products and experiences, including NYU Langone’s appointment search and scheduling applications. With this expertise, our team was well equipped to support New Yorkers through a digital vaccine scheduling process.
Using past projects as reference, we set out to develop a digital registration process that would be user-friendly, complementary to our vaccine distribution strategy, and integrated with our existing electronic health record (EHR) provider, Epic.
It was important that the registration form be clear and easy for patients to fill out from a range of devices and browsers, to ensure that all patients could register seamlessly, regardless of what technology they were using. We had to capture all of the vital information needed by our vaccine distribution teams, who would be interacting with patients during the vaccination process. Finally, the form would need to integrate with our system-wide electronic health record, to ensure that patients would receive reminders from NYU Langone about scheduling their second doses.
In less than five days, we created a new mobile-responsive web application that was fully integrated with Epic. Eligible New Yorkers were able to access our secure web-form, known as the “COVID-19 Vaccine Registration Form” to begin the vaccine scheduling process.
The registration form consists of three sections, which require patients to:
1.) Enter a valid access code
2.) Attest that they are eligible for the vaccine
3.) Provide demographics, insurance, and contact information
Access Codes
Our Faculty Group Practice (FGP) provided access codes to representatives of various businesses, schools, the United Federation of Teachers, and other organizations throughout New York City. These representatives then shared their access code(s) and a link to the COVID-19 Vaccine Registration Form with their employees or members. The access codes could be unique to a given individual, or shared by a dozen or even thousands of people in an organization.
Eligibility
After potential recipients enter their access codes on the registration form, they need to attest that they are currently eligible for the vaccine based on New York State Department of Health guidelines. They must also acknowledge that they will be required to show proof of their eligibility when arriving onsite to receive their vaccine.
Demographics Information
Next, patients provide key demographic information, including their name, date of birth, gender, address, email, and phone number.
After they submit the form, we determine if they are existing patients of NYULH. If they are, we associate their vaccine registration with their patient record. If not, we create a new patient record for them, establishing them as a new NYU Langone patient. In both cases, we flag the patient record to ensure it is added to the correct vaccine registry in Epic.
Confirmation Page & Email
After submitting this information, patients see a confirmation page and receive a confirmation email, asking them to activate and log into their MyChart account. Because they are now in the appropriate Epic Registry, patients automatically see an icon on their MyChart home screen for the COVID-19 Vaccine. They simply tap that icon to begin the scheduling process and find a location, date, and time that works best for them.
In a matter of days, and with help from several members of both our IT department and other teams throughout the organization, we completed the design, development, and testing of the COVID-19 Vaccine Registration application and went live on January 15.
Since then, the registration form has been submitted ~16,000 times, leading to more than 18,000 doses of vaccine being administered to eligible New Yorkers. This is in addition to the 100,000+ existing NYU Langone patients who have also been vaccinated at our institution.
We were able to help the public get access to a crucial tool in the fight against COVID-19 thanks to the investment in technology that NYU Langone has prioritized for several years. This investment enabled us to scale up our existing patient-facing applications for a new audience at a rapid pace and meet the demand for the vaccines needed to help our city recover.
· Rachel Grimmelmann, Associate Director of Digital Solutions, NYU Langone Health
· Connect with me on LinkedIn here.
