FAQ: How Salesforce Is Supporting Vaccine Management

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve worked closely with government, public health and healthcare organizations to support their response. In May 2020, we launched Work.com, a suite of solutions and resources to help businesses and leaders reopen safely and support the health and wellbeing of their employees, customers and communities.

Now, the world is preparing to deliver one of the largest mass vaccination campaigns in human history, but managing the process of safely distributing effective COVID-19 vaccines to potentially billions of people will be extremely challenging.

It is clear that a vaccine management solution is needed, and Vaccine Cloud provides that solution. It is the latest technology from Salesforce to help organizations, workplaces and schools around the world reopen safe

Introducing Vaccine Cloud — Securely manage vaccine administration at scale

Q. What is Vaccine Cloud? 

Vaccine Cloud helps public health authorities, healthcare providers, nonprofits and educational institutions around the world quickly scale vaccine operations, from recipient registration and scheduling to inventory management and public health outreach.

It is an end-to-end solution addressing the needs of governments, healthcare providers and organizations, as we continue the largest mass vaccination effort of our lifetime. Inspired by our customers, Vaccine Cloud helps quickly scale vaccine operations, from recipient registration and scheduling to inventory management and public health outreach. We will also be adding in new solutions for digital health credentialing and are doubling down on our efforts to help during this incredible important time.

Q. Who is Vaccine Cloud for? 

Vaccine Cloud can be customized to meet the needs of different industry customers including governments, healthcare providers and employers.

• Government organizations critically need data and insights to effectively run their vaccine campaigns – from securing enough doses to tracking vaccination rates and visualizing data. With Vaccine Cloud, governments can stay on top of monitoring their goals of vaccinating their populations.
• Healthcare providers need to stay connected to millions of recipients across hundreds of sites using a streamlined vaccination process. With Vaccine Cloud, providers can monitor everything from training and educating their staff to managing inventory and administering vaccine doses to performing follow up communications and mass outreach needs with speed and scale.
• Businesses need to adapt their operating model in this new normal. With Vaccine Cloud, businesses can connect their workers and customers with resources and content to increase vaccine literacy, track and understand how vaccination rates impact their reopening plans, and integrate technologies like digital health credentials to help create safer environments for their workers and customers.

New scheduling enhancements available for Vaccine Cloud

Q. What are the enhancements Salesforce announced for Vaccine Cloud on April 8?

A: Salesforce announced a free upgrade to Vaccine Cloud with more powerful scheduling capabilities that include faster, more reliable and more equitable ways for patients to schedule vaccine appointments. We’re excited to offer new registration and appointment scheduling enhancements to help residents easily register to hold their place in line and be notified when an appointment is ready. 

Q. How do these enhancements work?

Residents can easily register to hold their place in line and be notified when an appointment is ready. Here’s how it works:

• Residents can pre-register on their own time to receive their vaccine through a simple data capture in a hyper-scalable website. This improved data capture process is managed with a built-in content delivery network that scales for all traffic levels.
• Once eligible, residents are notified to schedule their appointment via the channel of their choice, including email or SMS, avoiding the need to wait for and time the exact moments when slots are released on the website.
• Vaccine Cloud then connects that person to a personalized scheduling process with a one-time use link, which ensures equitable access to the system.
• When the person clicks the link, the webpage shows where and when appointments are available and holds their place in line until an appointment is booked, easing the appointment scheduling process and reducing wait times. 

Q. Why did Salesforce make these enhancements? 

As public health authorities and healthcare providers manage the rapid increase in vaccine eligibility, existing scheduling, registration and communications systems are stressed. And with President Biden’s goal to widen U.S. vaccine eligibility to all adults by April 19, it’s more critical than ever for public and private organizations to have a platform in place to manage the coming influx of registrants.

Q. Will any of these new enhancements require a system integrator or ISV to help build them?

No. These free upgrades and enhancements to Vaccine Cloud will be available out-of-the-box and will not require a partner to help build them.

A solution for customers across industries 

Q. What are some of the ways in which customers are using Salesforce to address vaccine management?

Salesforce provides a rapid and flexible approach for managing, delivering, and administering vaccine programs with the following solutions:

• Public Health Command Center: Public health and healthcare organizations can access a complete 360-degree view of vaccine management in order to make data-driven decisions and take action when needed. Insight into the health status of communities and current inventory levels can help inform vaccine service needs and accelerate response time.
• Vaccine Inventory Management: In order to meet public health needs, Vaccine Inventory Management helps organizations confirm availability and maintain adequate vaccine doses, syringes, and PPE stock levels. It can also aid in accurately forecasting demand, help reduce waste, and avoid surplus supplies that could be needed elsewhere.
• Vaccine Appointment Scheduling: With the large number of people that will need to be vaccinated in a short amount of time, Vaccination Appointment Scheduling helps organizations make sure the vaccine type and protocol history are available as needed. Easily schedule and prioritize vaccination appointments by helping clinicians perform health assessments, capture electronic consent, and determine eligibility.
• Clinical Vaccine Administration: Clinical Vaccine Administration can be used to help ensure medical professionals are trained on vaccine administration before delivery, and can help avoid onsite bottlenecks by using pre-arrival screenings. Data analysis tools also allow agencies to assess readiness, manage community health, log and track administration of the vaccine, and analyze community-wide vaccine results monitoring.

Q. How are Salesforce partners involved in Vaccine Cloud?

We are working very closely with our partners to develop and deploy vaccine management solutions for organizations around the world. Not only are these partners Salesforce experts, they are crucial in customizing solutions based on individual customer needs. Global Strategic partners Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and KPMG, in addition to implementation partners Coastal Cloud, Infosys, MTX, PolSource, Sense Corp, Slalom Silverline and Traction on Demand are leveraging Vaccine Cloud to scale vaccine programs for customers globally.

Q. How are customers using Salesforce to manage vaccine distribution?

A: To date, more than 150 international, federal, state, and local agencies including: 

• Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance: In mid-December, we announced our collaboration to help Gavi in its efforts to provide equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines. The distribution effort, powered by Salesforce, has already started with Gavi well on its way to delivering at least two billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2021, including at least 1.3 billion doses for 92 lower- and middle-income countries around the globe. Details of the first round of allocations can be found here.
• Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness is using Salesforce technology to power its LouVax platform to help efficiently manage the vaccination rollout for its 750,000 residents. Dr. SarahBeth Hartlage, Interim Medical Director from Louisville Metro Department of Health and Wellness, recently explained how critical these platforms can be: “My team stood up the LouVax program from conception to reality in the space of eight work days. Salesforce technology has been invaluable in allowing us to provide vaccines at an efficient pace. Our average utilization here at LouVax has actually averaged over 100 percent every week since we’ve opened.”
• Ochsner Health is using Salesforce to innovate and create a patient-centric approach for its COVID-19 vaccine communications. As Louisiana’s largest nonprofit healthcare system, Ochsner Health is leveraging real time data and key interactions to create one-on-one conversations at scale and help establish patient trust. Using Salesforce to help fill vaccine appointments across the state, Ochsner is able to provide critical vaccine supply updates to over 20,000 patients weekly and keeps patients engaged throughout their entire vaccine journey.
• Penn State Health is using Salesforce technology for vaccine management to provide real-time registration, scheduling, vaccine administration, and vaccine inventory management. With Salesforce, Penn State Health is better able to understand how effective their efforts are at combating the COVID-19 virus throughout communities they serve across 29 counties in central Pennsylvania.
• Piedmont Healthcare quickly developed call scripts and dashboards that enabled nurses and agents to guide patients through a series of questions focused on COVID-19 risk, exposures and active symptoms. Within five hours of going live, over 150 calls were logged and patients were appropriately triaged to the right level of care. Now, Piedmont is innovating further by using Salesforce to help schedule vaccines for their employees and community members, as well as answer critical patient questions that come into their contact center.
• Lake County, Illinois is using Salesforce to power its cloud-based AllVax system to help streamline logistical pieces of the vaccination process so frontline workers can focus on helping its community with vaccinations. AllVax went live in just eight weeks and since then more than 200,000 people have signed up for the COVID-19 vaccination program using the platform.
• The State of California is standardizing its vaccination efforts via Myturn.ca.gov, an end-to-end vaccine management system powered by Salesforce, Accenture and Skedulo. To date, the State of California has now administered over 12 million vaccines to its residents.
• Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare provider, needed to urgently triage an overwhelming number of patients when COVID-19 hit. They quickly established a call center response using Health Cloud to manage over 1,600 calls per day across 150 staff. Now, Northwell is using Salesforce to manage vaccine scheduling, vaccine inventory management, and all text and email communications to patients during the vaccination journey.
• University of Massachusetts Amherst partnered with the state to launch a first responder vaccine registration page powered by Experience Cloud, which enables the university to book and track vaccinations. UMass is also using Marketing Cloud for communication and wellness checks across its community.
• MTX recently collaborated with the City of Chicago to launch the first of its kind cloud-based vaccination management solution in the U.S. The program, called GETVAXCHI, was deployed in preparation for the upcoming flu season and COVID-19 vaccination program that the City of Chicago is implementing to help fight the pandemic. MTX’s technology solution will make it easy for public health agencies to quickly, accurately, and securely distribute, administer, manage, and report the real-time results, integrated with the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. 

Q. What is Salesforce’s involvement with digital health credentials?

A: Digital health credentials are verifiable and trusted records or documents that enable people to easily share their health or vaccination status in a private, secure manner. These credentials can support sharing vaccination status, COVID test results, health attestations and more. In contrast to paper vaccination records, digital health credentials can be printed, use a QR code, or be stored on an individual’s mobile phone. Using common standards, digital health credentials can also enhance user privacy and “bind” an individual’s identity to a test result or vaccination certificate to help enable real-time, fraud-resistant digital verification.

Salesforce is leveraging standardized technologies to help facilitate integrations with any digital health credential management system. In particular, Salesforce is providing interoperable functionality for messaging, workflow and integration for emerging standards to help our customers manage issuing and verifying digital health credentials.

We are working with a variety organizations – like the Vaccine Credential Initiative, the Good Health Pass Collaborative and the Common Trust Network – to create the standards that will connect issuers (such as health systems, pharmacies, and state and local governments) to verifiers (such as workplaces, airlines and cruise ships, concert venues and sporting arenas), so that people can present privacy-preserving and trusted digital health credentials.

As always, we are consistent with our core values and our ethical and humane use and privacy principles to ensure technology is applied equitably.

Amplifying impact through partnership 

Q. How is Salesforce working with IBM to manage vaccine distribution?

IBM and Salesforce are partnering to help organizations as they strive to safely reopen public places and provide individuals with a verifiable and privacy-preserving way to manage and share their vaccination and health status in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of this offering, IBM Digital Health Pass will integrate with the Salesforce Work.com platform. 

Q. What is Salesforce’s involvement in the Vaccine Credential Initiative?

The Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) is a coalition of healthcare and technology partners committed to empowering individuals by helping them gain digital access to their vaccination records based on open, interoperable standards. The coalition is developing a standard model for organizations administering COVID-19 vaccines to make credentials available in an accessible, interoperable, digital format. Trustworthy, traceable, verifiable, and universally recognized digital records of vaccination or health status has worldwide importance for helping enable people to safely return to work, school, events, and travel.

Coalition partners include CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic, Evernorth, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, Oracle, Safe Health, and Salesforce. To learn more about the Vaccination Credential Initiative, go here.

Designing with trust in mind

Q. How is Salesforce approaching data and transparency when it comes to vaccine management?

Trust is our number one value at Salesforce, and we’ve developed our Privacy and Ethical Use Guidance for COVID-19 Response and our Principles for the Ethical Use of COVID-19 Vaccine Technology Solutions to guide our work in this area. It is especially important in highly regulated industries like healthcare, life sciences, public health and public sector. The Salesforce platform helps customers and organizations meet government compliance and security standards such as HIPAA, HITRUST, 21 CFR Part 11, FedRAMP and more. We share the responsibility in protecting user data by securing customer data on our platform, and by enabling developers and admins to configure the platform to meet their company’s or organization’s needs.

Interoperability has been a key consideration in our work on Vaccine Cloud. Using the power of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform and MuleSoft, the #1 API-led integration platform, customers and organizations can share data between public health information systems and immunization registries and Salesforce.

Q. How is Salesforce thinking about the ethical use of vaccine technology solutions? 

COVID-19 vaccine management and distribution is a new and complex challenge. Salesforce is committed to building technology and services in partnership with top medical and public health experts that will help our society safely and securely return to work and everyday life.

However, for technology to be effective, it must be built responsibly—and no matter how good a tool is, people won’t use it unless it has their trust. Technology alone does not solve for systemic health and social inequity. 

As we transition into this next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we will continue to engage public health officials and frontline workers, who we’ll listen to and learn from so we can best support their critical work. Technology can help organizations manage their COVID-19 vaccine programs, providing capabilities for vaccination appointment scheduling, vaccine inventory management and administration, notifications, outcome monitoring, and more.

There are three core principles acting as a north star for our company, as well as customers and partners, on ethical, socially responsible and equitable uses of our technology: human rights and equity, privacy and autonomy, and trust and transparency. 

To learn more about these principles, go here.

Q. How will you ensure products are being used in alignment with public health guidelines and other compliance standards?

We partner closely with medical experts to stay in line with public health guidelines, such as those from the U.S. CDC. The Salesforce platform also helps customers and organizations meet government compliance and security standards such as HIPAA, HITRUST, 21 CFR Part 11,and  FedRAMP in the U.S. We share the responsibility in protecting user data by securing customer data on our platform, and by enabling developers and admins to configure the platform to meet their organization’s needs. We have also developed a checklist for our customers to think through these important requirements.

Learn more about Vaccine Cloud’s capabilities here.