Vaccine Scheduling, APIs, and (Maybe) Vaccination Passports
As most Americans who have received a Covid-19 vaccination—or who have tried to schedule one—know, attempting to make an appointment is painful. Here is a thread describing the ordeal in Maryland, but it’s broadly similar elsewhere. In New York City, where I live, vaccines are administered by the city, the state, several different pharmacy chains, countless local pharmacies, some major medical centers, and more, and you have to sign up with each of them separately to see if any appointments are available. Here, the situation was so crazy that unofficial meta-sites have sprung up. The New York City Council passed a law requiring the city to create an official central web site.
It didn’t have to be this way, if proper planning and development had started last year, at the national level, but of course it didn’t. The answer is simple, at least conceptually: standardized interfaces, sometimes called APIs (application program interfaces) or network protocols.
Every large medical provider has its own scheduling system. These exist, they’re complex, they may be linked to patient records, staff availability, etc. That includes pharmacy chains—I had to use such a system to schedule my last flu shot. It isn’t reasonable to ask such organizations to replace their existing scheduling systems with a new one. That, however isn’t necessary. It is technically possible to design an API that a central city or county scheduling web page could implement. Every vaccination provider in the jurisdiction could use their half of the API to interface between their own scheduling systems and the central site. The central site could be designed to handle load, using well-understood cloud computing mechanisms. Indepdendent software vendors could develop scheduling packages for non-chain pharmacies that don’t have their own. It all could have been very simple for people who want to be vaccinated.
Mind you, designing such an API is not a trivial task. Think of all of the constraints that have to be communicated: age, job, residence, place of work, what eligibility categories a provider will accept, and more. There need to be mechanisms for both individuals to schedule shots for themselves or their families, and for operators of city-run phone banks to make appointments for the many people who don’t have computer access of their own, or who can’t cope with a web site that may have been poorly designed. You need logins, "I forgot my password", wait lists, people who can show on short notice lists, cancellation, queries, and more. Nevertheless, this is something that the tech industry knows how to do. (I used to be part of the leadership of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which standardizes many of the network protocols we all use. That’s why I, on a Mac, can send email via a Linux web server to a Windows user, which they may view using a platform-independent web browser: there are standardized ways to do these things. Protocols can be simple or complex, but they’re routinely designed.)
And once you have an API, software developers have to implement it, for central sites, for small providers, and as interfaces to existing scheduling systems. That latter is itself likely to be a complex task, since you’re touching a large, probably messy codebase. Nevertheless, this is all routine in the software business.
All of this could have been done. It should have been done; the situation—high demand for a limited resource, with various priority levels—was predictable long ago. As soon as it was apparent that the world was confronting a deadly pandemic that could be dealt with by a vaccine—that SARS-CoV-2 had that spreading potential was understood by some in January 2020, and Moderna had its vaccine designed two days after they received the virus’ genome sequence—the Department of Health and Human Services should have convened an API design group. In parallel with that, developers could have started on their own software while waiting for the API specs to be finalized. I’ll take it a step further: we should still go ahead with this effort. We may need it for booster shots or to cope with new variants; we’ll certainly need it for the next pandemic.
And we may need something similar now for vaccination passports. There is not yet a consensus on their desirability; that said, many places already require them. Almost certainly, the little card you got from your provider is inadequate in the long run. You’ll have to request the standardized version, either on paper or for the many different apps you’ll likely need—and that many need a similar API.
