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Salesforce.com Inc. on Wednesday announced a new tool, Vaccine Cloud, to help government agencies, health-care organizations, businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions quickly and efficiently deploy their COVID-19 vaccine programs.
San Francisco-based Salesforce CRM, +0.15% considers the technology crucial because many government agencies and health-care organizations don’t have the technology infrastructure to handle the complexity, speed and scale necessary for vaccine administration as the Biden administration tries to hit its goal of 100 million shots in 100 days.
Organizations have been bedeviled by inventory and logistics management, getting people registered and scheduled for their vaccines, and recipient outreach and vaccine-outcome monitoring.
“This is basically a more broader ecosystem of what we have done earlier,” Dr. Ashwini Zenooz, Salesforce’s chief medical officer, told MarketWatch. “As vaccines become more prominent, you need a central system that connects all that. That is a lot of heavy lifting on the backend.”
One customer, Lake County Health Department in Illinois, is using the technology to ease logistical challenges of the vaccination process, according to Jefferson McMillan-Wilhoit, director of health informatics and technology for the county. Some 200,000 residents have signed up to receive COVID-19 vaccinations.
In California, where Salesforce has assisted the state in COVID tracking, more help in vaccine management is on the way, Zenooz said, though she declined to provide further details. “We’re trying to make the process as seamless as possible,” she said, as the Biden administration tries to reach a lofty goal of ramping up shots in the spring and reaching nationwide herd immunity by the end of summer.
The cloud tool joins a growing vaccine-distribution effort by Salesforce to put needles into arms.
Under a partnership with International Business Machines Corp. IBM, +3.30%, Salesforce is helping expand the availability of IBM Digital Health Pass, the company’s new health passport app, to help organizations verify an individual’s vaccine status and any other relevant health credentials.
In addition to its partnership with IBM, Salesforce is teaming with global vaccine agency Gavi on its project to equitably distribute the vaccine in 190 countries. Salesforce is also part of a project with consultant MTX for Chicago to manage vaccine distribution, an arrangement that could be expanded to more cities.
