The pandemic changed the whole world and brought the need for immediate vaccination. In this crisis, time development companies started to create different software solutions for the needs of doctors and patients. One of the most successful solutions is for Scalable Vaccination Scheduling and it is developed by ITFrontDesk.
Our client, ITFrontDesk, is a technology company headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Its primary focus is to offer complete, automated solutions for all of the front desk needs of a business. By automating the front desk tasks, the company helps businesses improve operational efficiency and allow them to focus on their core business. Their mission is to enable the customers to provide outstanding care to their customers and run their business more efficiently.
ITFrontDesk implements custom front desk solutions to meet its customers’ needs. The customers appreciate that the company does not require an extended contract that locks them into this service for years. “We strive to provide service that is so outstanding our customers won’t want us to leave,” said Glenn Harris, Director of Sales and Marketing for ITFrontDesk.
This project was accomplished by eApps, a CloudScale365 company.
Fighting with Website Errors
Once the site was launched, it was stalling and getting 500 errors. ITFrontDesk called our support team who assisted them in optimizing the database, adding more Tomcat nodes, configuring external IPs to Tomcat nodes, increasing the bandwidth of servers to 400 Mbps, and adjusting scaling and other configuration settings. ITFrontDesk developers also refined the code to improve the database queries and to limit the number of Java threads to 4 per server per second to avoid thousands of people trying to book for the same date/time as the available time slots pool gets smaller and smaller.
Ops as a Service
Our Jelastic environment is a high-performance service with vertical and horizontal scaling. The automatic scaling feature is vital to handle the very high volume of load that comes online quickly. Our technical team is very knowledgeable about how to set up and configure a highly scalable solution such as this. CloudScale365 provided the “Ops” to our “Dev” team. The result was a textbook Dev/Ops collaboration.
Mass Vaccination Scheduling as a Challenge
A County Health Department in Michigan implemented ITFrontDesk’s Vaccine Online Scheduler in mid-January 2021 and in the first month they have already scheduled more than 20,000 vaccine appointments – at a rate of over 150 bookings per minute. Appointments are being scheduled for both frontline healthcare employees and eligible patients in Phase 1B of Michigan State’s vaccine distribution plan.
ITFrontDesk’s COVID-19 vaccination online scheduler leverages its appointment booking technology and 15 years of optimizing appointment inventory to accelerate access to vaccinations. ITFrontDesk developed this new online scheduling app to help public health entities streamline the logistics surrounding this mass COVID-19 vaccination program.
ITFrontDesk’s COVID-19 vaccination online scheduler helps to address the scheduling complexities so these organizations can focus on providing care. Public health organizations can introduce a screening questionnaire to ensure patients’ eligibility before they can access the scheduling service. Once they are eligible, patients gain access to vaccine scheduling where they can select their preferred vaccine appointment site, date, and time, and instantly book their appointment online. Upon booking, patients receive both a text and email confirmation of their appointment and receive a reminder phone call the day before the scheduled date and time. Patients have access to check their appointment date/time or cancel their appointment online.
1 Million Hits with Nearly 30,000 Unique Visitors
Every Tuesday at 8:30 AM EST, the client opens the scheduler for COVID-19 vaccination appointments to the public. After some startup issues, the application has been working smoothly with no load issues. On Tuesday, February 23, 2021, the company handled close to 1 million hits with nearly 30,000 unique visitors. All of the appointments for the upcoming week were booked within 10 minutes of opening.
Expanding Coverage
ITFrontDesk is in the process of a national rollout of our COVID-19 Vaccination Online Scheduler to assist Community Health Organizations in streamlining the appointment scheduling process for COVID-19 vaccinations.ITFrontDesk’s solution is already playing an important role in helping the fight against the pandemic.
