Covid Vaccination Logistics Management Solution

Covid Vaccination Tracking System for a large German State#

The Brief: One of the largest German states needed a robust, offline-capable system to manage the early-stage Covid vaccinations for its most vulnerable population, and they needed it quickly. The system was based around over a hundred vaccination centers that handled medical data, appointment data and vaccination histories for millions of people as well as vaccine delivery logistics from BioNTech/Pfizer to the in-center cooling fridges.

Challenges: Extreme time pressure and many stakeholders, limited network availability at the vaccination centers, some of which were mobile units for old folks’ homes, handling of critical patient data that must not be lost under any circumstances, and no control over the devices used for data collection.

Our Solution: Together with a large German design and development agency, we built out an initial proof-of-concept for our technical approach in roughly a week. Our offline-capable progressive web app built on React and PouchDB with a Node.js/CouchDB backend convinced all of the stakeholders, and we were tasked with building, rolling out and monitoring the full app on the same tech stack in a very in the directly following three weeks as part of a larger, distributed team, with our company focusing on the database and offline aspects.

The system offered:

• Robust offline use of most features, allowing vaccination centers to continue scheduled vaccinations, set up appointments and record medical data regardless of their connectivity.
• End-to-end encrypted data sync with multiple distinct targets: medical records were encrypted on the client with a different public key than statistical data, as the target organisations would not be allowed to read each other’s data. Our infrastructure did not have access to the plain-text data at all.
• Multiple fallbacks for storing and transmitting crucial medical records, using CouchDB/PouchDB’s extremely solid data replication capabilities, but also accounting for the possibility that the surrounding software or devices themselves may fail, and temporary paper records have to be digitised later.
• A telemetry system that monitored data synchronisation performance and problems on each device and was crucial in debugging and fixing transmission issues remotely.
• A highly-available CouchDB backend system spanning two geographically separated data centres incl. Enterprise authentication with Keycloak

The Result: The vaccination management system was rolled out on time in over one hundred vaccination centers and mobile units despite enormous urgency, and functioned without any larger failures or downtime. As expected, individual vaccination centers occasionally had problems transmitting data, but these issues could all be solved remotely thanks to our telemetry system. All in all, no data was lost, even when technical issues required temporary paper records. The app helped millions of people make vaccination appointments, and the many vaccination centers to fulfil and track these appointments.