Begin by establishing a multidisciplinary team of stakeholders. It may include leaders from your organization, health officials, essential labor, customer or community representatives, and others. Including a range of partners helps you capture diverse perspectives and build trust. That team should convene to reaffirm the vision and mission and then work together to develop strategies and approaches to tackle the challenge ahead.

Decide on a technology platform that will help you meet your goals for execution and give you the flexibility to switch gears as things change. With the right platform, you’ll have a system that can:

• Scale with you and your vaccine management requirements as they evolve
• Connect you and your team members – whether they’re in an office, in the field, or at home
• Reduce the need for manual processes with automation and workflows
• Serve as a single source of truth for your customers, employees, and stakeholders

In order to move quickly, your technology platform should also be easy to deploy. Cloud-based platforms can be implemented in weeks, not months or years, and can connect to legacy systems easily. Prebuilt platforms or connections mean your program can get up and running sooner and your team members can begin working more quickly. And since cloud-based platforms are easier to maintain, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your platform is always up to date so you can focus on more pressing challenges.

Pull data from multiple systems into a platform with an easy-to-use data visualization dashboard. That lets you see your vaccine management data at a glance and leads to quick and actionable insights. Data visualizations can quickly uncover stories and identify trends in data so you can make data-driven decisions.

Establishing how to prioritize recipients and distribute the vaccine will be your first challenge, regardless of the size of the population you’re managing. Define clear procedures for implementing official guidance to help you allocate vaccines. Some groups are more susceptible to the worst outcomes from the virus based on risk factors such as age, preexisting conditions, or line of work. Prioritize your critical at-risk groups, followed by subsequent at-risk groups, until you’ve accounted for your entire population.

A unified platform helps by letting you categorize individuals based on their available health records. With an understanding of recipients’ risk status, you can align your vaccine distribution plans more effectively. Salesforce recommends that artificial intelligence (AI) should not be used to make allocation decisions or to predict or infer personal characteristics that would impact a person’s eligibility or priority for a vaccine.

As you schedule appointments, ensure you will have the supplies you need for each one. Decoupled systems – such as one managing scheduling and another tracking inventory – can lead to problems. You could end up with too much vaccine and not enough recipients, wasting precious doses. Or, you might run out of doses, wasting individuals’ time and energy – and leaving them unprotected. Or, you might even be missing a critical link, such as the needles to deliver the doses into arms. A system that links related information avoids such missteps.