“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. In October, health care navigation company Castlight Health, which had previously worked on a Covid-19 testing locator, reached out to see if it could help build something similar for vaccines. The story of mRNA: How a once-dismissed idea became a leading technology in the Covid vaccine race “It became clear that we needed a partner,” said Jared Hawkins, director of informatics in the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator at Boston Children’s. 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. “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.Īs 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.īut 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.
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“I think in many ways we feel like one team,” said Brownstein. The Boston Children’s team already knew its way around the CDC.
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