With complaints and frustration in Massachusetts at what some have found to be a cumbersome and confusing sign-up process for vaccines, one Arlington woman took it upon herself to make it easier.
Olivia Adams, a software developer and mother of two young children, told us she decided to create her own website after hearing from her mother-in-law that it was difficult to find available vaccinations and to arrange an appointment with Massachusetts. online. portal.
“Although the state’s website has a centralized location, there is a different website for each place, and they all work slightly differently,” said Adams. And there’s no right way to say, ‘Okay, what the hell places have available in the next week or how many slots are available? Am I wasting my time calling every CVS around me to see what the hell is going on is? ‘ ‘
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The developer, while on maternity leave from her job at athenahealth, created macovidvaccines.com, where vaccine sites and their available time periods are all on one page.
Adams said she has worked during her 2-month-old baby’s naps and after both of her children have gone to bed for the past three weeks. She estimates she spent about 40 hours setting up the site.
“It’s been a learning curve,” she said. “I’ve never made my own real website before, it’s so complicated, so it’s definitely been a great learning experience.”
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Adams acknowledges that the launch of the Massachusetts vaccine hotline announced by Governor Charlie Baker on Friday is a great move, but she thinks it doesn’t go far enough.
“I think so many people want to have a website that they can look at,” she said. “We have the technology. The resources just haven’t been deployed yet, so I really hope this gets some traction and that we can take it somewhere.”
We asked Baker at Friday’s call center press conference if he would consider implementing Adams’s idea on the state’s website.
“Send us her name and we’ll talk to her,” Baker replied.
“I think the feedback we are getting from the outside is incredibly helpful,” he added. “And if I stayed here, I could go through a long list of tweaks, changes, tweaks, reforms and new initiatives that have been launched since the beginning that require outside feedback.”
Two Massachusetts State Representatives, Rep. Mike Connolly and Rep. Jay Livingstone, also took note of Adams’ initiative. They sent a joint letter to Baker on Saturday asking him to support her work and embed the design she created in the state’s official vaccine planning site.
Adams “is the vaccine hero we’ve all been waiting for !!” Conmolly said in a tweet and tagged her in the post.
Adams said she would like to meet with state officials if they reach out.
“I am 100% open,” she said. “Let’s get ourselves out of this mess ASAP.”
Residents and state lawmakers alike have complained that the Massachusetts vaccination website is difficult to navigate. Adams says the problem goes all the way up.
“The federal government has kind of forced the states to work on this and the states have told others … we have our own sites, Fenway, Gillette, such big ones, they’ve been working on and they have that centralized place where you You can look, but everywhere the vaccines are is like, here’s your supply, check it out, “she said. And that’s where the problem trickles down, this decentralization. It’s really hard for our residents to figure out where to go. It’s an organizational problem for sure, but we can improve it. … So I hope that we are able to get more resources for it and that I can help where I can. “
While she’s had a lot of fun creating her vaccinations sign-up website, Adams says it’s kind of crazy how many people reached out to her to tell her that’s exactly what they wanted the state to offer them.
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“It’s kind of crazy that after I started publishing this, there has been such an outreach and so many people have said, ‘This is what I was looking for, this is what I needed,” she said. “And the state didn’t realize this and wasn’t able to do this in a more centralized way with resources that I didn’t work at night on my maternity leave.”
With her maternity leave coming to an end soon, Adams said that if she has enough time to continue working on the site, her dream ultimately is for people to be able to sign up and receive emails when more vaccine appointments are available on their surface.