Situation Assessment
With the recent highly publicized H1N1 flu outbreak, releasing information and scheduling vaccinations for the general public presented some major challenges to health officials across the country. Vaccination quantities and arrival dates were difficult to forecast because of limited information received by local health departments from the vaccine distributors. The general public would need to be updated immediately when the vaccine was received.

Solution Overview
Risetime was asked to lead McHenry County Health Department’s efforts to redesign an existing web to accommodate support for the H1N1 flu outbreak. Key requirements for the project included ensuring maximum uptime and scalability for the web based application. The site would also need to give McHenry County Health Department officials the ability to post clinics with the vaccine and appointment times, and allow these times to be automatically removed as they were scheduled by the public.

After the system was upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and migrated to the new environment, administrative interfaces were added to allow McHenry County Health officials to access and revise the vaccine information. Multiple reviews and iterations with the McHenry County staff ensured interface design and overall system usability mirrored the day-to-day operations of the department. Ultimately, the web based application provided the public with clinic locations, real time availability of appointment times, and guidelines on qualifying for the vaccine. It also allowed users to schedule their own appointments after completing a questionnaire ensuring they qualified.

Solution Highlights:

• Establishment of a reliable, fully redundant data center through a Microsoft hosting partner.
• Development of a forms-based authentication system restricting access to the administration pages while authenticating McHenry County Health Department administrators.
• Development of an automated system for scheduling and tracking inventory of flu vaccination appointment times.
• Design of a screening tool allowing users to be qualified as vaccination candidates and along with the ability for McHenry County to easily revise qualification questions as government requirements changed.

Value Measurement
The H1N1 Flu Vaccination Application has provided McHenry County a streamlined and efficient process for communicating flu vaccine availability to the general public without increasing the staff size or plan for the flood of incoming phone calls accompanying each year’s flu season. More critically, the online application has given vaccine candidates the ability to schedule and plan vaccinations for themselves and family members.

Additional benefits include:

• Reductions in administrative, phone, office supply and overall health department overhead through the use of a self-service and fully electronic vaccination scheduling solution.
• Accurate and real time reporting reducing the administration duties of staff members while increasing the accuracy of the data.
• Faster forecasting tools for vaccine inventory allowing for an increase in proactive requests for additional supplies. 

To find out more on how Risetime can provide similar high-quality results to your business, contact us.