With the impending arrival of vaccines at the beginning of 2021, eHealth NSW worked closely with the Ministry of Health (the Ministry), the State Health Emergency Operations Centre (SHEOC), the Commonwealth and other states and territories to fast-track digital efforts to support the mass vaccination of NSW Health staff and other frontline workers such as police and quarantine and border workers.
Since the inception of the COVID-19 vaccination program, eHealth NSW worked rapidly to develop a digital system to fast-track the vaccination of frontline workers. This solution, CoVax, continued to be enhanced and was ultimately made available for bookings by the general public.
In parallel, to ensure scalability and ease of use, work commenced with industry to design a platform for managing the entire vaccination administration process: from booking an appointment, to tracking vaccination doses, recording clinical information and interfacing with the Australian Immunisation Register.
Since launching the state’s vaccination program, more than 1,370,500 doses have been administered using NSW Health vaccination management systems.*
eHealth helps deliver solutions in record time
The CoVax Solution went live on 14 February 2021 with South Western Sydney Local Health District. It was developed in record time, within 21 business days, and with assistance from Microsoft, DGL and Whispir. It is currently being used by 64 individual clinics across 14 of the 17 NSW Health local health districts and specialty networks.
So far, it has been used to capture more than 675,000 vaccination registrations and re-released more than 80 times in response to system user feedback. Anecdotally this has been extremely positive.
Teams from eHealth NSW also helped to support Sydney Local Health District with the implementation of the MyCovax (5Faces) solution, which supports the state’s first mass vaccination hub at Sydney Olympic Park.
Alongside this, the NSW Health Vaccination Administration Management (VAM) Platform, developed in partnership with ServiceNow, went live on 11 June 2021. It was also configured and implemented in just 10 business days.
Simon James, eHealth NSW Executive Director, Customer Engagement and Services Transition, said “the eHealth NSW team has worked collaboratively with key stakeholders to provide a secure digital solution for vaccination bookings in record time to ensure the safe and timely rollout of the vaccination program in NSW. "This is a significant achievement for eHealth NSW and the NSW Health system," said Mr James.
Teams across eHealth NSW are working to transition appointments from CoVax to VAM, which is a complex undertaking as updates continue to be made to the system and its usage remains high. Appointments have already successfully transitioned from several live clinics and the speed and efficacy of this process continues to improve.
*Numbers quoted are from COVID-19 Update Media Release 20210727.
