Clinic administers 12,000 vaccines
SALINAS >> Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System’s affiliate Salinas Valley Medical Clinic provided about 700 more vaccinations on Friday to eligible individuals and has distributed about 12,000 doses so far to people it covers over the past few weeks.
“We are holding the clinics five days a week and often on Saturday,” said Karina Rusk, a Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System spokesperson.
Rusk said the expansion of criteria depends on guidance from Monterey County because the challenge of vaccine supply remains for vaccination providers.
Adding more people to the rolls of vaccination eligibility, the California Department of Public Health issued an update on Thursday that says beginning Monday, health care providers may use their clinical judgment to vaccinate individuals age 16 to 64 who are deemed to be at the very highest risk for morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 as a direct result of one or more of the severe health conditions included in this provider bulletin.
Salinas Valley Medical Clinic is an open, payor blind health care system developed to expand access to primary and specialty care services to all people in Monterey County. It has identified 60,000 people within Salinas Valley Medical Clinic that are at risk with chronic medical conditions so it is vaccinating a diverse group in the targeted ZIP codes, said Rusk.
According to Monterey County Health Department spokesperson Karen Smith, the state’s guidelines for Monday would have no impact on the vaccination schedule for Monterey County since people will be signing up and making appointments for a COVID-19 vaccination at clinics as supply allows. The county scheduled Wednesday for the expanded eligibility since new supplies of vaccine come in by that day.
“Our goal is to get as many eligible people in our community vaccinated as quickly as possible and we are leveraging our electronic medical record system to filter and quickly identify people who fall into those high-risk groups,” said Rusk. “We are doing about 700 to 1,000 vaccinations a day.”
Rusk said that initially, the
clinics started at the two Salinas Valley Medical Clinic PrimeCare locations in Salinas and Monterey.
“We have now consolidated for efficiency because most of the highrisk population we serve is falling in the Salinas ZIP code area so we’re now holding the vaccine clinics at one of our Salinas Valley Medical Clinic locations on Abbott Street in Salinas,” said Rusk. “We are administering the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine from that location.”
By leveraging its electronic medical records system, Salinas Valley Medical Clinic has created an efficient and effective process and is identifying anyone who has come into contact with the Salinas Valley Medical Clinic health care facilities, directly contacting them to register and receive the vaccine either through the MyChart patient portal or via email.
“One advantage is that MyChart is one of two systems which currently has the ability to transfer data seamlessly into the state’s database, MyTurn,” said Rusk. “That feature allows us to reduce time and expense of data entry.”
But since many in the most vulnerable population are not connected by computer, Salinas Valley Medical Clinic is utilizing a robocall system to reach out to eligible patients to schedule appointments.
This direct approach is one of many being deployed in the county and complements other programs that utilize an open registration process in which eligible participants continue to check back for available openings at various locations.
“We have a large room set up with social distancing for check-in, vaccination and monitoring,” said Rusk. “It’s going smoothly and we are getting great feedback from those going through the process.”
Salinas Valley Medical Clinic has received 100 doses of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine and will be administering it at Taylor Farms Family Health and Wellness Center in Gonzales.
Rusk said the clinic is working with an agricultural company to target migrant farmworkers because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is one dose and more effectively used for people who have a difficult time following up for a two-dose vaccination regimen.
“We don’t have any additional J&J shipment scheduled to come in however we are hopeful for more in the near future,” said Rusk.
For more information on getting vaccinated in Monterey County, visit https://bit.ly/3bk6IwI.
It would not have been fair to expect Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response to the coronavirus to be neat and orderly.
After all, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. We haven’t been through this before. There is no simple playbook, especially for a state as large and complex as California. The governor and state officials have had to figure it out as they go along. Such is the nature of an unprecedented crisis.
To a certain extent, that helps explain the confusion over the state’s testing, the bungled attempt at contact tracing, the constantly changing criteria for sheltering and reopening businesses, and the botched effort to reopen schools.
But, as we enter the second year of the pandemic, Californians have reason to be frustrated by the continuing confusion, especially the chaotic rollout of vaccine distribution. This is the one Newsom had time to prepare for.
Instead, residents face shifting criteria and a fractured system that has left them to fend for themselves as they toggle between websites for national drug store chains, county health departments, the state registry and signup lists with health care providers such as Kaiser and local hospital systems.
Newsom’s attempt to bring order to the chaos with a centralized system is laudable. But to try to do so by unilaterally making Blue Shield the vaccine czar was tone deaf and ill-advised.
Had the company been selected and prepared to step up in December, we’d be having a different conversation. But the governor has left counties to fend for themselves for three months. They’ve worked out systems to distribute vaccine and often best know how to get them first into the arms of the most vulnerable. It hasn’t been perfect. Far from it.
Contrary to Newsom’s claims in his State of the State address on Tuesday, the state does not have “the most robust vaccination program in the country.” On a per-capita basis, California ranks 46th of 50 states for the number of residents fully vaccinated.
But to rip up the system now and start from scratch — by appointing Blue Shield to create, manage and oversee a statewide network of vaccine providers — makes no sense. Which is why the counties revolted and forced the state to reconsider.
County officials don’t want to be told this late in the game how to do what they were already doing. Some, including officials in Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties, have also raised legitimate concerns about the financial conflict Blue Shield might have as it makes decisions on the state’s behalf about which health care providers receive vaccines.
That potential conflict, which could run afoul of the state’s most serious law aimed at preventing self-dealing, remains an issue even as the counties opt out of the Blue Shield network. All indications are that Blue Shield will continue to play a key role with distributing vaccines to noncounty entities.
Blue Shield has been a major donor to Newsom’s campaign, his ballot committees and his program to address homelessness. The company’s no-bid contract to oversee vaccine distribution prohibits it from directly profiting on the deal. But the decisions it makes could potentially affect the people it insures and the health care providers it does business with.
In an ideal world, the state would handle the distribution itself. But the California bureaucracy, which has brought us the debacles at, for example, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Employment Development Department, is probably not up to the vaccine distribution assignment.
So, Blue Shield, or another insurer, might be the best alternative the state has to provide the service. But the conflict concerns should be independently evaluated before the company fully takes the reins, even in a more limited capacity, at the end of the month.
We don’t expect Newsom’s response to the pandemic to be perfect, or even close. But the longer it goes on, the better he needs to become at anticipating problems and addressing them thoughtfully, legally and transparently.