The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most significant disruptors of normalcy in human life since the World Wars of the 19th Century. As of March 2021, official records revealed that globally over 119 million people were infected since the outbreak began in the last weeks of 2019. Fatalities recorded worldwide to date was over 2.63 Million and the economic uncertainty created across countries is still largely existent. However, the silver lining has finally been achieved with dozens of vaccines successfully completing their clinical trials and authorized by governments across the world for deployment on a large scale. Now comes the next big challenge – managing vaccine delivery for nearly 8 Billion people globally.
In a world full of diverse cultural, social, religious, and economic disparity, administering the COVID vaccine will be one of humanity’s biggest logistical and management challenges ever faced to date. But as much as the complexity around vaccine management lures in the dark, the world today has a very big ally by its side in the form of digital and big tech. The world relied on technology ranging from analytics to artificial intelligence in the discovery of potential vaccines as well as for monitoring and managing the pandemic situation, and the next step of vaccine management will see technology taking the driver’s seat as well.
Let us examine the top four ways in which technology enables better vaccine management and helps accelerate recovery from such deadly pandemics through faster vaccine administration.
Using powerful cloud-based platforms, government bodies, as well as private organizations, can create a seamless information exchange environment for people to seek information about the availability of vaccines and register or enroll themselves into the many vaccination programs that are available for their country or company by providing valid consent. Additionally, such systems can act as a base platform for healthcare or vaccine administering bodies to update information such as location-based availability, the inventory or stock of vaccines available at any point of time, conduct surveys to assess needs of inventory for future drives, and so on. The platform can act as a key component of vaccination programs by making seamless information access and exchange between different stakeholders involved in the vaccine lifecycle - from drug manufacturers to logistics, administrators, and end-users who want to be vaccinated.
As the world continues to limp back to normalcy, several events or travel and tourism activities will require strict adherence to regional or national vaccination policies. People who have been vaccinated would require their vaccination status to be available for easy access by any entity that wishes to permit entry only for vaccinated people. Modern cloud-based platforms can provide easy portability for vaccination data to other digital platforms used by different organizations such as booking websites, entertainment ticketing platforms, electronic visitor records of private or government bodies, etc. Once these systems are integrated, people who are vaccinated can enjoy hassle-free travel and other amenities. These platforms can provide data in whichever format is required for universal acceptance and can hence automate verification processes in large events or areas like airports and office complexes.
While we have already covered the several facets that modern digital platforms can make available for vaccine providers and takers, the best part is that these facilities can be accessed conveniently from even smartphones. Everything from appointment scheduling for vaccination to the generation of vaccination certificates on-demand for travel verification can be done from dedicated smartphone apps which can integrate with such powerful digital vaccination management applications.
Governments, regional, or national healthcare regulatory authorities, as well as healthcare providers, would need to make informed decisions on matters such as the ordering of vaccines, deployment of staff, set up facilities, etc. all based on the demand generated from people for the vaccines. Using intelligent data analytics, such digital platforms can offer valuable insights to all stakeholders and decision-makers to forecast demand and prepare for responding accordingly. It can help governments and healthcare providers collaborate on scheduling and coordinating vaccine campaigns. This can also help them achieve targets for critical programs focusing on more vulnerable categories of population, and much more.
The road to normalcy is highly dependent on how effectively the global population can achieve herd immunity from the COVID-19 virus and its numerous variants that have been circulating around for over a year. Vaccination is the answer but getting the vaccines out globally on a war footing requires resilient and comprehensive technology platforms like PopcornApps vaccine management platform. Our solution is built on the Salesforce Vaccine Cloud and is customized to empower a wide range of vaccine management operations. It is an on-demand, high-performing platform to tackle challenges in onboarding people into campaigns as well as effectively managing their vaccination credentials with assured global validity.
Talk to us to know more about how we are helping the world recover faster by enabling more efficient vaccination programs globally.
