Protecting a population was the impetus behind a health department’s unusually rapid ramp-up of a national vaccination program.

The country of Ireland required a system built from scratch that would vaccinate not only the populous, but also the health workers, and do it all at the same time as the build.

“We needed to vaccinate people immediately,” said Fran Thompson (pictured, right), chief information officer of Health Service Executive, an 80,000-worker government health agency.

Thompson and Tim Elcott (pictured, left), sales and delivery director of services for Salesforce at IBM, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Think event. They discussed how Ireland rolled out its COVID vaccination program in record time. (* Disclosure below.)

The challenge

Health Service Executive chose to build with IBM and Salesforce. One of the reasons for that choice of not using internal HSE infrastructure and consequent third-party vendor was that the managers determined there would be a need to provide services in non-standard, non-owned medical sites: “Pop-up clinics — literally a tent in a location, or we took over a sports hall or whatever,” Thompson said. “So from an organizational perspective, there were huge challenges in that we were like every other health service worldwide facing an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people.”

The challenges, in addition to facing the pandemic itself, included the fact that there was no preexisting national vaccination program.

“How do we stand up a national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccines to the totality of the population?” Thompson asked.

They also wanted non HSE-employees to be able to administer the vaccine doses.

“I remember the very first conversation I had with Tim: ‘Look, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now, OK? And you’ve got two weeks to start, and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and be able to roll it out to the hospitals. And very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes, now.’ That was the challenge.” Thompson explained.

Rollout in two weeks

One of the biggest issues that arose was that although, because of the speed, compromise was always going to play a part, there was a need for security.

“This is personal data going into these systems,” said Elcott, who added that scalability was also a consideration. “It needs to be that national platform going forwards. We’re going live every two weeks and we have done that now for the last three months.”

HSE has now delivered more than a million vaccines, according to Thompson. That’s about one-in-five of the population.

Issues did come up during the process: Vaccines along with availability changed during the rollout.

“None of us have worked through a pandemic before,” Thompson stated. Older people appeared to be more susceptible to the virus because of preexisting medical conditions, which meant that the team had to figure in a risk-based approach to who got vaccinated fastest — including the healthcare workers.

“There were lots of people dying from this,” Thompson added.

Regarding the development process, “everything is up for grabs and we’re just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all,” Elcott explained.

Teamwork was crucial for success, according to Thompson. “The team, they’ll drop what they were doing, make the changes. We tested them fast and we pulled them in and then deliver the rest of the sprint,” he said. “We couldn’t waste a week that just wasn’t available.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE