‘Time short’ for DHBs to prepare for vaccination

A large United States software company says time is short for New Zealand district health boards to put in place the systems that will be needed to manage the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines.

But the Ministry of Health says it has work in hand, and an ‘‘interim solution’’.

ServiceNow, which is valued at

US$105 billion (NZ$146b) on the Nasdaq exchange and employs more than 12,000 staff, said it was helping 100 organisations, including NHS Scotland and North Carolina’s health department, with their vaccine programmes.

New Zealand country manager Hamish Miles said it was having discussions with DHBs about its Vaccine Administration Management Solution.

DHBs didn’t have much time to put systems in place before vaccinations of border workers and health professionals are due to commence in April, he said.

ServiceNow’s system is designed to manage tasks such as tracking the delivery of vaccines, scheduling inoculations, and recording ‘‘no shows’’ and any adverse reactions.

Miles said the scale of the vaccine programme made it ‘‘one of the biggest workflow challenges of our generation’’.

ServiceNow wanted to ‘‘work collaboratively’’ with DHBs and the ministry, which it believed would be providing them with guidance, he said. DHBs needed to make decisions quickly. ‘‘We don’t have time for some long-winded procurement process.’’

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Health indicated it had a plan as to how the vaccine programme would be managed.

Auckland University vaccinologist and associate professor Helen Petousis-Harris warned in July that the existing National Immunisation Register (NIR), which was built in 2005, was ‘‘old