Maryland company behind Massachusetts vaccine registration issues ‘didn’t know’ slots were opening to new groups

A Maryland-based company under fire for some of the website failures that plagued coronavirus vaccine signups here on Thursday said it “didn’t know” eligibility was opening to another 1 million people that day.

“We didn’t know, but that’s not an excuse for us,” Tiffany Tate, executive director of the Maryland nonprofit behind the online appointment scheduling system PrepMod, told the Herald. “Our site should not have missed a beat and it did, and we’ve done everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

PrepMod is Massachusetts’s largest vendor for booking vaccine appointments online. It’s behind the maimmunizations.org registration website that was overwhelmed by the crush of appointment-seekers on Thursday.

“Our site typically receives about 1,000 requests per minute,” Tate said. But at 8 a.m. Thursday, when appointments for those ages 65 and older or with two or more medical comorbidities were supposed to go live, “it went from 1,000 requests per minute to 70,000 requests per minute,” she said.

PrepMod is used in 27 states and jurisdictions, some of which have reported issues with the software.

“We accept responsibility whether someone told us the appointments were dropping or not,” Tate said. “We should have been ready and we will be ready.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders said the state was “very displeased with the performance by PrepMod” on Thursday, telling WBZ-TV that “they certainly were aware of our making the changes.”

But PrepMod’s website isn’t the only one that experienced glitches on Thursday.

The state’s Vaxfinder website, vaxfinder.mass.gov, which uses a tool developed in partnership with Project Beacon to help people find open vaccine appointments, also crashed — prompting the octopus graphic now ubiquitous with its failure.

“All of yesterday’s website problems were unacceptable and the administration has acknowledged responsibility for the outages that frustrated many residents,” COVID-19 Command Center spokeswoman Kate Reilly said. “Despite the website issues, the appointments at mass vaccination sites were all booked for the week and today the website has been functioning for residents accessing the platforms.”

The Vaxfinder tool was quickly developed by Project Beacon and rolled out by the state last week amid mounting criticism over the difficulties residents have faced in trying to find open appointments.

“The administration is evaluating more options to improve the website,” Reilly said in a follow-up statement to the Herald.

Gov. Charlie Baker, who said his “hair’s on fire” over the issues, will likely be pressed to answer for these website failures and more when he testifies about the vaccine rollout before the Legislature’s joint COVID-19 oversight committee next Thursday.

“There’s just been so many pivots and many of them seemed to happen kind of overnight or with very little notice to the public, to the organizations involved in terms of allocation and administering the vaccine,” state Rep. William Driscoll, D-Milton, the committee’s House chairman, said. “We want to make sure things go a lot smoother from here on out.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3qP56Ac