North Rhine-Westphalia had provided 450,000 additional vaccine doses from Astra-Zeneca at short notice at Easter. The state offered the special quota to citizens over 60 years of age. In the Westphalia-Lippe region, the KVWL and its industry partners T-Systems and ServiceNow took care of the appointment allocation. As expected, the rush for the spades was great.
From 9 o’clock on Saturday morning, the new booking portal for appointments was activated. Within just two hours, 120,000 vaccinees had registered and received an appointment. By midday on Sunday, 168,000 had registered and around 10,000 of them had already been vaccinated by Sunday evening. The booking portal counted 7,000 hits per second and 5,000 appointment bookings per minute at its peak. Since Tuesday morning, the portal has made another 80,000 appointments for over 79-year-olds. The servers withstood the onslaught: users had to wait a maximum of three minutes for a successful booking.
KVWL and industry partners draw a positive conclusion to the launch
The KVWL draws a positive interim conclusion on the launch of the new portal:
“We are very pleased with the successful launch of the new booking platform for vaccination appointments in Westphalia-Lippe. The platform was activated on Easter Saturday and at the same moment several million users were able to book a very limited number of vaccination appointments. Despite this huge rush, the system functioned stably – in one second alone we recorded more than 7,000 page views! Even the virtual waiting room, which we used as a precaution, hardly had to be used. All in all, we are very satisfied with this start-up and would like to thank T-Systems and ServiceNow for the good cooperation!”, said the board of directors of the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians of Westphalia-Lippe, Dr. Dirk Spelmeyer, Dr. Volker Schrage and Thomas Müller.
The general contractor for the appointment system is the Telekom subsidiary T-Systems. Peter Lorenz, responsible for digital solutions at T-Systems, says: “NRW has benefited from our good experience with the vaccination portal in Saxony. We were prepared for large numbers of users and saved people frustration when booking appointments. The portal has shown what it can do.”
T-Systems’ technology partner is the US company ServiceNow. Detlef Krause, Vice President EMEA Central and General Manager Germany of ServiceNow points out, “Vaccine management is the biggest workflow challenge of our generation. Human lives are at stake and trying to manage the pandemic with 20th century technology will fail.” Krause adds, “People deserve to get the right information, in the right place, at the right time. The vaccination process should be as hassle-free as ordering food from a delivery service. We have the solution for this and, with T-Systems in Germany, we also have the right partner to make this work as it should. We have the solution that saves lives and also gets lives back to normal with COVID.”
