Beth Israel Lahey Health builds COVID-19 vaccine deployment system in two weeks with AWS

Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) in Massachusetts collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to co-build a COVID-19 vaccine deployment solution in just two weeks for its employees and affiliated providers.

BILH serves approximately 1.3 million patients across eastern Massachusetts and has employees spread over 13 hospitals and more than 100 primary care and ambulatory sites—with multiple stand-alone human resources (HR), employee health, and electronic medical record systems.

BILH urgently needed to build a system to prioritize the order of vaccination for employees, invite employees to schedule appointments for both first and second doses (date, time, and choice of over 25 vaccination locations), remind employees the day before a scheduled vaccination appointment, and document vaccine administration for employees when they arrive at their appointment.

Working with AWS Professional Services to rapidly build and test a solution

This project had many unique challenges. Given the limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines at the time it was important to properly prioritize vaccinations for those staff who were most likely to be exposed to COVID-19. Though BILH has records of all staff assignments, they needed supplemental information to accurately prioritize their staff, as many employees were reassigned to different areas of the system during this time and titles alone could not indicate exposure risk.

BILH has an in-house team of information technology specialists who have prior experience with building on AWS. Because the vaccine deployment solution needed to be built on a very tight schedule, with go-live just two weeks after the project’s start, the overall solution was designed by BILH and AWS to be comprised of several interacting components, which enabled the BILH in-house team to immediately start building the prioritization and administration pieces of the solution.

BILH needed assistance in rapidly building and testing the scheduling part of the solution. They engaged the AWS Professional Services team to build out the tools to communicate securely with prioritized individuals to enable them to schedule a vaccination appointment without potentially compromising any personally identifiable information. To do this, the AWS team built an app that sends an email with a unique link per individual to an email address that was verified during the prioritization step. With a single click on the unique link, the individual accesses a web app where they can schedule or defer an appointment for COVID-19 vaccination. Those choosing to schedule can select their desired vaccination site, date, and time based on continually updated availability. The app then sends a confirmation email listing the chosen site, date, and time, along with the unique link in case rescheduling is needed. If employees wish to defer scheduling their vaccination for any reason, they are able to select one or more reasons for their deferment.

Figure 1. Walkthrough demonstration of the vaccine scheduling system including functions such as accepting or deferring the appointment, indicating a reason for deferral, and selecting the location, date, and time for the appointment.

The day before an employee’s vaccination appointment, the app sends a reminder email. Once an individual arrives for vaccination, a separate solution component, built by BILH’s team, enables staff to check in the individual and capture administration information such as vaccine manufacturer, location of vaccination (right or left arm), and vaccine lot number. Following administration of the first dose, the communication app sends another personalized email with a unique link to enable scheduling the second dose appointment during the appropriate manufacturer-recommended time window.

The COVID-19 vaccine deployment solution was built using Amazon PinPoint, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Figure 2. High-level architecture diagram outlining end user connectivity to the vaccine scheduling application and user interaction between the administration and appointment scheduling applications.

Building upon success with employees to benefit patients

The solution built with the help of AWS Professional Services allowed BILH to connect data from across the enterprise into one streamlined system to prioritize, communicate with, schedule, and check in employees for their COVID-19 vaccination series. Within six weeks of initial deployment in December, the vaccine was offered to over 30,000 employees, including all who have any potential contact with COVID-19 patients.

The BILH team has since expanded the solution they successfully deployed for their employees to use with their 1.4 million eligible patients. After a smooth deployment of this expanded system in late January 2021, within the first days, over one hundred thousand invitations were sent, and patient vaccinations began February 1.

Read on for more healthcare stories, and learn how the AWS Cloud has helped power solutions for organizations across the public sector to respond to the unique challenges stemming from COVID-19.

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