UPDATED 10:00 EDT / MARCH 22 2021

CLOUD

Google Cloud works to help states roll out COVID-19 vaccines

Google Cloud today announced ways it’s helping state and local governments roll out COVID-19 vaccines to residents as part of its Intelligent Vaccine Impact program.

The states that the Google LLC cloud unit has partnered with include Arizona, North Carolina, Oregon and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Google announced IVI in February to help communities get vaccines to more people quickly and effectively.

The company is doing this now by wielding its expertise in cloud technology to connect with existing local technology infrastructure. In some localities, Google Cloud is assisting with information, scheduling, distribution and analytics. In others, Google is solving issues such as data sharing and analytics surround vaccine sites or providing metrics surrounding supply chains or individual sites.

In December 2020, the Arizona Department of Health Services built an end-to-end vaccine management distribution system that would allow its four million citizens to schedule and receive COVID-19 vaccinations through a Google Cloud interface.

As of today, Arizona has administered 2.6 million vaccines and the Google Cloud system has booked more than 1.5 million appointments.

In late January, North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services announced the development of Find My Vaccine Group site that allows citizens to determine that vaccination group they’re in to determine if they’re eligible to get a vaccination at that time. And Find My Vaccine Location site that uses Google Maps to enable users to search by ZIP code, current location, or a map view and is regularly updated. To date, more than 2 million North Carolinians have used both sites.

“North Carolina is engaged with Google on a few projects in our fight against COVID-19. Our newest effort is to develop a process and technology to streamline accessing information for North Carolinians,” said Sam Gibbs, deputy secretary for Technology and Operations of North Carolina’s DHHS. “This technology will provide a central location for residents to find information such as when it is their turn to get their vaccine or guidance to easily locate a vaccination location.”

Oregon needed to prepare to increase the number of residents eligible for vaccination in February. As a result, the Oregon Health Authority, built the Get Vaccinated Oregon website, a vaccine eligibility screening and scheduling tool, in partnership with Google Cloud and Spring ML. More than 400,000 Oregonians have registered to receive communication about eligibility and get connected to local vaccination events.

Also, in February, the Virginia Department of Health launched its own COVID-19 vaccine pre-registration campaign, Vaccinate Virginia. Today, Virginia has more than eight million residents who are vaccine-eligible. On launch day, more than 180,000 pre-registrations have been successfully made – by the end of February the state had more than 1.9 million records in the system.

“We had an immediate need to have Virginians pre-register in a standardized manner for COVID-19 vaccine to appropriately manage the vaccine administration process,” said Suresh Soudararajan, chief information officer at Virginia Department of Health. “We partnered with Google Cloud and SpringML to address this need and were able to deliver the solution in record time.”

Google and numerous other technology companies have been working with state and local governments to get vaccines rolled out. For example, in January, Google pledged $150 million toward vaccine education and added localized information to searches and maps alongside offering up numerous buildings as vaccination sites.

Similarly, Amazon.com Inc. joined in by offering logistics to distribute vaccines around the U.S. and Facebook Inc. recently announced its own campaign to deliver reliable information on vaccines to users. At the beginning of March, Tableau Software LLC announced an update to its COVID-19 Data Hub that would put businesses and governments at the forefront of understanding vaccination rates through data visualization.

Photo: Pixabay

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