CDC launches VaccineFinder tool to locate Covid-19 vaccine providers - STAT

public to search nationwide for approved Covid-19 vaccine providers.

On vaccinefinder.org, users can enter an address or ZIP code and select a search area — say, within 10 miles — and get a list of providers with contact information, eligibility criteria, and, when available, a link to a vaccine scheduler.

was fighting the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009, a team at Boston Children’s Hospital built a public, searchable map of vaccine providers.

So as soon as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, began to circulate in the U.S., the team started preparing.

“We didn’t always know what role we would play, but there was always an assumption that we would do this in some capacity,” said John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s and founder of VaccineFinder.

The Boston Children’s team already knew its way around the CDC.

“We’ve been working with the same people for a lot of years.” And recently, it had used some extra CDC funding to start incorporating flu vaccine stock information into its tool, said Kara Sewalk, a program coordinator for the team.

As vaccine research raced ahead, the team realized that not only could VaccineFinder serve as a public resource, but it would have the infrastructure to systematically collect data about on-hand vaccine supply — whether at a big chain pharmacy, a local doctor’s office, or a massive stand-up vaccination site at an arena.

But as the Boston Children’s team met with the CDC throughout the summer, they recognized this would be a project that required more scale, speed, and security than they’d handled before.

16, the CDC issued its first playbook for vaccine rollout, including instructions for states on “how to submit facility information and daily vaccine inventory reports for Covid-19 vaccination clinics to CDC’s VaccineFinder.” The infrastructure needed to support those daily reports posed a huge engineering challenge.

“That was around the time when CDC was asking for us to play a much larger role in their response than what we were traditionally used to,” said Sewalk — that meant not just displaying public-facing vaccination providers, but reporting their supply data directly to the CDC.

The team had expanded to meet the challenge: The Boston Children’s team was 15 strong, Castlight added around 40 more, and the CDC had members of its own operational team on the job.

Before the first shot went into the first arm, Castlight and the Boston Children’s team had to build a system to onboard each one of those sites into the VaccineFinder system, and allow them to update their on-hand vaccine supply of Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines every 24 hours — hopefully.

“We ask them to report supply data every day,” said Sewalk.

Instead of registering big pharmacies individually, the team developed a way for national companies to report all their vaccine data for every location at once.

Of the 21 pharmacies participating in the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program, 14 report their supply at all locations directly to VaccineFinder.

responsible for handling vaccine deployment — states, territories, and a few cities — 31 have decided to collect data from all of their vaccine providers themselves, and report it in bulk to VaccineFinder.

To get the most reliable data to the CDC and the public, Castlight built the VaccineFinder onboarding process to be as simple as possible: After creating a new account, the provider could either manually input inventory or upload a spreadsheet with their daily data.

What the public sees about vaccine availability isn’t necessarily the same information the CDC receives.

Along with supply information, the team is also trying to make enrollment and scheduling easier by providing links to those tools — for some providers, at least.

Even with those tools available, the team expects a surge of site visitors bigger than any it’s ever seen, all relying on VaccineFinder as an island of verified information in a sea of confusing directives.

For months leading up to the launch, the site has displayed a simple banner letting people know what’s coming: “VaccineFinder will be updated once Covid-19 vaccination is widely available to the public to help direct people to find a vaccine provider near them.” That time, arguably, has not yet come; most states are still only offering vaccines to those over 75