Montco updates vaccine link system

NORRISTOWN >> Montgomery County officials are updating a COVID-19 vaccine registration system to help thwart what they say is the “unethical” practice of people sharing appointment links with others, including on social media sites.

“In response to this ongoing problem, we are close to implementing a system that will send out an individualized single-use link for appointment scheduling. We hope to have this system run

ning when we send out the appointment links for next week,” county Commissioners’ Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh said during a news briefing. “We are committed to delivering the vaccine in an efficient and equitable way.

“We should very soon have a process in place where each appointment link is a single-use link and so even if someone did forward it or post it on social media that link would be useless to anyone else who tried to use it,” Arkoosh added.

Officials explained that PrepMod, a vaccine registration program purchased by the Pennsylvania Department of Health and used by county health departments to schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments, generated appointment links that were not individualized, which led to some people sharing the links with others who currently may not be eligible for the vaccines.

“We have had a number of

cases where individuals sent that link to somebody else, to a family member, to a friend and sometimes they have posted it on social media. Because of this problem with the links not being unique, other individuals were able to use that same link to make an appointment,” Arkoosh explained, adding some of the individuals were not in the eligible categories to receive the vaccine.

Given the limited supply of vaccine, people were turned away at the vaccination site if officials determined they did not fall in the groups that are eligible to be vaccinated.

“It’s unfortunate that people felt that it was OK to share those links. This is not ethical or moral and it needs to stop,” Arkoosh reiterated on Wednesday.

“The problem has been one that has been growing and one that required a technological solution and so our team has been working hard to find a solution that we could implement very, very quickly on top of the existing PrepMod system,” Arkoosh explained.

With the update, in order

for those who are preregistered for a vaccine to get into the PrepMod appointment scheduling system they will have to enter a single-use passcode that they will receive in an email from the county.

“Then once you enter that, you will be able to make an appointment through PrepMod,” Arkoosh explained. “That code is a single-use code so even if somebody does share it, that code will not work once it’s been used.”

The county also currently relies on the PrepMod program to gather and send all data about people who have been vaccinated to a state immunization registry.

“It’s very important to understand that the thing that PrepMod does very well is send all the data about all the people that have been vaccinated to the Pennsylvania Statewide Immunization Information System (PA-SIIS),” Arkoosh explained. “We are required to report the data on everyone that’s been vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine within 24 hours.

“Given the volume of people that we’re vaccinating here in our county health

department, we would have to bring in an entire team of people to manually enter that data into the PA-SIIS system if we didn’t have a program that uploaded it automatically,” Arkoosh added.

Appointments are required to receive the vaccine. All those eligible for the vaccine in Phase 1A can pre-register to receive the vaccine through the county health department. The pre-registration link can be found at www.montcopa.org/COVID-19 under the green vaccination information button.

Last week, the Montgomery County Office of Public Health opened a vaccination clinic at Norristown High School to serve those who have appointments to receive their first dose of the vaccine.

Those receiving their second dose of the vaccine are being served at a clinic hosted by the Montgomery County Community College campus in Whitpain.

As of Friday, 153,502 people had pre-registered on the county site for an appointment, according to the county’s latest data.