With complaints and frustration in Massachusetts about what some have found a cumbersome and confusing vaccine filing process, an Arlington woman took it upon herself to make it easier.
Olivia Adams, a software developer and a mother of two young children, told us that she decided to create her own website after hearing from her mother-in-law how difficult it was to find available vaccinations and for a appointment in Massachusetts’ portal.
“While the state’s website has a centralized location, there’s like a different website for each location, and they all work slightly differently,” Adams said. “And there’s no good way to say like, ‘OK, what slots are available in the next week or how many slots are available? I’m wasting my time calling every CVS around me to see what’s 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 slots are all located on one page.
Adams said she worked during her two-month-old baby and that both of her children have gone to bed for the past three weeks. She estimates she spent about 40 hours getting the site up and running.
“It was a learning curve,” she said. “I’ve never made my own real website before, it’s so complicated, so it was definitely a great learning experience.”
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Adams acknowledges that the launch of Massachusetts’ vaccination phone by Governor Charlie Baker on Friday is a big step, but she does not think it goes far enough.
“I think so many people want a website they can look at,” she said. “We have the technology. The resources have just not been deployed yet, so I really hope it gets a bit of traction and that we can move somewhere with it.”
We asked Baker at the call center news conference if he would consider implementing Adams’ idea on the state’s website.
“Send us her name, we’ll talk to her,” Baker replied.
“I think the feedback we receive from outside is incredibly helpful,” he added. “And if I were to sit here, I could go through a long list of adjustments, changes, adjustments, reforms and new initiatives that have been launched since the beginning, involving feedback from outside.”
Two Massachusetts representatives, Representative Mike Connolly and Representative Jay Livingstone, also take 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 vaccination scheduling site.
Adams “is the vaccine hero we’re all been waiting for !!” Conmolly said in a tweet and tagged her in the mail.
Adams said she would like to have a meeting with government officials if they reach out.
“I’m 100% open,” she said. “Let’s get out of this mess as soon as possible.”
Residents as well as lawmakers in the state have complained that the Massachusetts vaccination website is difficult to navigate. Adams says the problem extends to the top.
“The federal government has similarly pushed the states to work on this and the states have similarly said to others … we have our own sites, Fenway, Gillette, such big ones, that they have worked on and those do have that centralized place where you can look, but wherever the vaccines exist, it’s, here’s your stock, find out, ‘she said. “And that’s where the problem ends, this decentralization. It’s really hard for our residents to figure out where to go. It’s definitely an organizational issue, but we can make it better … so I hope we can get more resources for it and that I can help where I can. ‘
Although she had a lot of fun logging her website for vaccinations, Adams says it’s a little crazy how many people have reached out to her to tell her that this is exactly what they want the state to provide.
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“It’s a little crazy that, after I started publishing it, there was such an outreach and so many people said, ‘This is what I was looking for, this is what I needed,'” she said. “And the state did not realize it and could not do it in a more centralized way with resources I did not work at night during maternity leave.”
With her maternity leave coming to an end soon, Adams said that if she has enough time to work on the site, it’s ultimately her dream that people will be able to sign up and receive emails when there more vaccinations for vaccination are available area.