By Sarah Krouse
Executives from an industrial conglomerate, a health system and
a professional sports ownership group met up this month in their
Charlotte, N.C., neighborhood to walk and vent. The national
rollout of Covid-19 vaccine doses, they agreed, wasn't going fast
enough.
By the end of the stroll, they had sketched the outline of a
plan to speed things up: Combine the logistics technology of
Honeywell International Inc., the expertise of health system Atrium
Health, and the real estate of Tepper Sports & Entertainment to
inoculate thousands more people a day than the average North
Carolina vaccination site currently does.
"It's the last mile," Honeywell Chief Executive Darius Adamczyk
said of the problems that have plagued the vaccine rollout. Mr.
Adamczyk is part of the North Carolina trio, along with Atrium CEO
Eugene Woods and Tepper President Tom Glick. "We dramatically need
to pick up the pace."
The North Carolina executives aren't the only business leaders
stepping in to offer private-sector expertise to help more
Americans get Covid-19 shots.
Washington state this week said that private companies will lend
expertise to accelerate its vaccine rollout, among them Starbucks
Corp., which will provide help with vaccine-administration facility
layout and has started working on ways to reduce patient wait
times.
Amazon.com Inc.'s senior vice president of world-wide
operations, Dave Clark, wrote to President Biden on Wednesday
offering Amazon's "operations, information technology, and
communications capabilities" to assist national vaccination
efforts, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Wall
Street Journal.
Running appointment systems for vaccines has been tough for some
states, with long waits and cancellations. Vaccine-administration
sites in some places operate for only a few hours a day, while
public health departments with little tech expertise have cobbled
together systems for appointment reminders and bookings.
"For the most motivated patient this is a very hard thing to
do," said Dr. Oliver Kharraz, chief executive of ZocDoc Inc.,
adding that he fears people's frustration will eventually lead them
to give up. ZocDoc is offering its scheduling tool used for doctor
visits to health and other organizations for Covid-19 vaccine
appointments.
The North Carolina executives are working to create a faster
system for vaccinations that will be put to work at Bank of America
Stadium in Charlotte, where the Tepper-owned Carolina Panthers play
during football season. They say they will have a plan by the end
of the month, with a goal to inoculate 10,000 people a day.
About 40% of the vaccine doses that have been distributed to
North Carolina have been administered, according to Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention data, while about 46% of the 36
million doses distributed nationally have been administered.
"Getting vaccines in people's arms as quickly and equitably as
possible is a top priority for the administration," said a
spokesman for state Gov. Roy Cooper, adding that the governor had
previously announced plans to create mass-vaccination sites across
the state to bolster its rollout. State records, which update more
quickly than CDC figures, suggest that about half of the doses
North Carolina has received have been administered, he said.
A North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services
spokesman said that the state first set up sites in each county and
has established facilities that can deliver more doses a day as
supply has grown.
Executives from the companies spent the past week visiting
vaccination centers and said they realized the complexity of the
problems. More administration sites are needed, they concluded,
along with booking systems that can handle large numbers of
appointments, and ways to move dose recipients in and out of
facilities faster. Also, states would need to be prepared to
swiftly shift from one priority group to the next.
The executives last week secured buy-in for their fledgling plan
from Gov. Cooper and billionaire hedge-fund manager David Tepper,
who owns the eponymous entertainment company.
This weekend, the group plans to open a drive-through
vaccination center at the Charlotte Motor Speedway to pilot some of
their ideas. All 15,000 appointments for that three-day event have
been filled, and Honeywell is contacting its Charlotte-based staff
for volunteers to greet patients, help with registration and work
on data entry.
The speedway trial will require about 565 people each day to
run, including nurses, parking helpers, security, emergency medical
and other staff. Estimates for the workers needed at the football
stadium are still being determined, a Honeywell spokesman said.
Moving recipients through vaccine sites more quickly will likely
require the cadence of an assembly line, Honeywell executives say,
along with better systems for collecting recipients' information
and managing inventory. The group has considered appointment-making
systems such as those used for concert and sports ticketing.
Atrium Health, a major North Carolina nonprofit health system
with 70,000 employees, will deliver the doses, and hopes the effort
aids its continuing work to vaccinate more people at other sites it
operates, said executive vice president and chief physician
executive Scott Rissmiller.
Plans are still being completed, but they will likely eliminate
on-site patient paperwork, use Honeywell bar codes and scanners to
process documents, and avoid manual data entry within a
state-reporting portal. Patients will be asked to fill out their
details online before they arrive, and will be given directions for
where to report at vaccine sites. They will receive a bar code for
administrators to scan when it's time to receive their shot.
Honeywell will dedicate some call-center capacity to field
questions from vaccine seekers. It will also rely on its
track-and-trace software and expertise to design appointments and
the layout of the new sites, so that several doses can be
administered every minute. At the racetrack site, Honeywell plans
to use an automated car-counting system to monitor how cars move
through the process and highlight bottlenecks.
While some changes to vaccine sites may save just seconds or
minutes, executives say those add up to significant cost and time
savings when applied to tens of thousands of recipients.
The companies aim to operate the football-stadium center for as
many hours a day as possible, and are considering a
first-come-first-served line outside centers late in the day to
ensure doses aren't wasted.
Sporting facilities such as Bank of America Stadium offer large
parking lots and facilities encircling the field that are built to
accommodate large crowds and protect operations on site from
inclement weather, said Torsten Pilz, chief supply chain officer
for Honeywell.
If the new model works, the group hopes it can serve as a
template for other cities and states.
--Heather Haddon contributed to this article.
Write to Sarah Krouse at sarah.krouse@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 21, 2021 07:57 ET (12:57 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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