Web engineers develop shortcuts to find COVID vaccine appointments

A cottage industry of coders has cropped up to centralize information on COVID-19 vaccine appointments, so the public doesn’t need to check site after site only to find no appointments.

“There’s this huge network right now that is actually disseminating the vaccines. So they’ve got Rite Aid and ShopRite and Stop & Shop,” said Keith Basile, a solutions engineer with the New Haven-based company Veoci.

“What’s disappointing is that work wasn’t done ahead of time, whether it was years ago or this past year, that you wouldn’t have all those agencies setting up and saying, ‘Hey, here’s how we’re going to provide our availability, and here’s how we’re going to do our appointments and centralize it.’ ”

With hundreds of thousands of new appointments available and snapped up each week, tracking down appointments can be difficult because providers update independent scheduling websites on no set schedule. Basile said the issue is communication.

“I don’t care if I get it from

Rite Aid, or CVS or ShopRite, I just want it, I want it in my arm quick, right?” he said. “I think the problem was that there wasn’t a central way for their existing appointment systems to communicate with the state and the federal government.”

Sukhminder Grewal, CEO and co-founder of Veoci, said his company offers a pointand-click platform to manage emergency management issues.

For example, their system might be used to track storm damage in a certain municipality. Or hospitals might use it to manage crisis situations.

But when Basile became eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccine, he was faced, as was nearly every Connecticut resident, with decentralization with every hospital provider and pharmacy running vaccine portals.

“I was like, ‘Well, how am I going to sort of get noticed? Or how am I going to get alerted when these things become available?’ ” he said. “I wanted the vaccine, so I created this thing.”

His system checks any available appointments every five minutes at various providers and sends an email or a text message when one pops up.

“That night, I contacted our leadership team and was like, ‘Hey, guys, I built this, I think this can help our company. Why don’t we offer this to our employees?’ And just say, ‘Hey, if you want to receive alerts, go for it,’ ” he said.

Veoci’s tool is not available for the general public, but VaxBot is online for the public.

Anu Pokharel is usually an engineer at Salesforce, but he said nowadays he’s a full-time dad on parental leave.

In order to help get a vaccine appointment for his wife, a public school teacher, he put his programming skills to work.

“Over the course of a couple of hours, I wrote a little program to get vaccine appointments,” he said. “And it worked actually remarkably well for my wife and then some of her friends, and I started getting people vaccinated.”

VaxBot was the result. Like Veoci’s tool, it regularly checks available providers and notifies users of any availability.

“There’s obviously the inherent unfairness of it, because it’s nice if you’re a programmer,” Pokharel said. “So, we should make something that anybody could use easily to do exactly what we were doing, without technical skill.”

Pokharel said the decentralization meant people with specific knowledge and skills were better off than others.

“Do you want to get a vaccine appointment? Know a Python programmer,” he said. “You know, that’s probably not the way it should be.”

VaxBot is available to the public, but it’s not a moneymaking venture.

“Anu is incurring the costs out of pocket currently,” said Michael Israel, Pokharel’s partner in the venture.

“It’s not a company. There’s no incorporation,” Pokharel said. “It’s just something that we decided that we needed to make.”

Soon there will be more appointments available than there are people eager to get vaccinated. But Grewal said this may have been a learning experience for future pandemics.

“That’s why the whole thing is like, ‘You know, we’ve already screwed up, so why bother?’ There’s a certain element of that,” he said. “But especially when it comes to a lot of large organizations, they’re unable to meet a necessity even though they see it, and somebody from outside comes in. So that’s why you have to be open to outside ideas.”