PrepMod creator calls for ‘all hands on deck’
Still saying they didn’t know about the boost in those eligible
Hours after the state’s largest vaccine appointment-booking vendor was overwhelmed by shot-seekers for another week, PrepMod creator Tiffany Tate said improving the system “requires all hands on deck.”
“We can’t do this alone,” Tate said during a legislative oversight hearing Thursday.
“We’re struggling and that we don’t have all the answers — engineers, people who manage large crowds, people who predict trends and traffic to websites — we need that in order to be able to deliver to your citizens what they deserve, which is not frustration when they’re trying to access a website,” she said.
Residents looking to book vaccine appointments through PrepMod’s maimmunizations.org website have been met with error messages or hours-long wait times.
Tate’s team talks to the state “daily,” but “did not know” signups for those 65 and up or with two or more medical comorbidities were opening last week.
The state’s rollout “has far exceeded what was anticipated,” Tate said. Despite the glitches, Tate said PrepMod — which the state’s paying more than $400,000 for — has helped connect more than 200,000 Bay Staters to shots.
Massachusetts also “secured a license” for the Maryland-based nonprofit’s vaccine preregistration software, which Tate said has been available since the fall.
State and federal lawmakers have called on Gov. Charlie Baker for a centralized preregistration system. But Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders later said Tate’s COVIDReadi software was an “aggregate data-collector,” not a preregistration system.