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Software Fail: CDC Vaccination Tracking System Causes Woes
In early 2020, the CDC contracted with Deloitte to build a system to schedule and track the vaccinations of Americans. The system is called Vaccine Administration Management System, or VAMS. It is free for any US state to use it to manage the scheduling of COVID-19 vaccinations.
Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC’s Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that “we believe it’s very important for us to have end-to-end vaccine tracking and dose-level accountability. That data is crucial to allow flexibility in targeting, in allocation, in ordering, in vaccine management.”
Noam Arzt, the president of HLN Consulting, said that “VAMS was intended to fill a need that states and jurisdictions were not equipped to do themselves. It was clear we needed a way to run these clinics, to schedule people to go, and try to make sure they come back for their second dose.”
Despite the cost of $44 million to develop, it hasn’t worked out. Early on VAMS had usability issues, performance issues, and crashes.
Courtney Rowe, a pediatric urologist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, said that “VAMS is fussy. There’s days when VAMS works, and days when VAMS doesn’t work. I basically function as tech support. There’s days when VAMS works, and days when VAMS doesn’t work. It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome. The ‘Next’ button is all the way down and to the right, so if you’re on a cell phone, you literally can’t see it. In the first round, people using VAMS mostly had advanced degrees. If you’re 75 and someone asks you to log into VAMS, there is zero way it’ll happen without help.”
Despite the problems in the US, Deloitte Canada won a $16 million contract from Ottawa in Canada for building a similar vaccination system there.
