A group of students and staff from the W. P. Carey School of Business in one weekend developed a software system that will help Maricopa County efficiently distribute swine flu vaccinations.
Professor Ajay Vinze and his team from the business school’s Information Systems Department was asked two weeks ago to develop the software after working with the Maricopa County Public Health Department for six years.
The team faced several challenges while developing the software, including overcoming the shortage of vaccines, deciding which demographics are the priority and finding a way to distribute the vaccine evenly.
“When they called us it was almost as if they wanted the system yesterday; tomorrow might be OK,” Vinze said.
The swine flu vaccine is optional, and each patient will be given one of four different vaccines, depending on his or her situation. For example, the shot given to pregnant women is different from the one given to children.
Maricopa County had originally been receiving information about who needed the vaccine from multiple sources and recording it in several different ways.
With Vinze’s team’s software, all that information is now in one program that allows health officials to see how many vaccines have been allocated, the type of people who need the vaccines and which providers are distributing them. Based on this information, health care workers can decide which clinics will get the vaccine.
“It’s one thing to design [the system] or think it through a strategic or tactical perspective,” Vinze said. “It’s another thing to be there and make it happen.”
Within the team’s first four-hour meeting, Vinze said county officials were excited to see how many ideas the group formed.
Group members worked side-by-side with county officials to develop the program, and days after their first meeting, the group handed over the first version of the software to the county
Trent Spaulding, a doctoral student involved in the creation of the software, said it was a whirlwind weekend to make the software come together.
As the team built the program, the county was inputting live data and using it at the same time, he said.
“It reminds me of the [Electronic Data Systems] commercial where they’re building the plane while flying it,” Spaulding said.
The main focus of the software is to create a central location for vaccine information and allow users to easily view the data and make an informed decision, Vinze said.
“This was not going to replace the decision being made [by health officials about where the vaccines are distributed],” he said. “This is really a support system.”
Each day, officials from the Public Health Department wait to hear from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and officials from the state of Arizona to see how many vaccinations they will receive for that day.
Officials then have a few hours to decide who is the highest priority for the vaccine, he said. For example, if they decide pregnant women are a priority, they distribute it to the obstetricians and gynecologists in hopes they will use the vaccine as suggested.
“We can only give it to the doctors and providers,” Spaulding said. “We can’t tell them how to use it.”
Aaron Baird, a doctoral student involved in the project, said everyone from the top down has to make the same decisions about where the vaccine goes.
“The key thing is there’s really nothing magic[al] happening here,” Baird said. “It’s just a complex problem that [now] allows for quick decision making.”
Spaulding said county officials have been resourceful in learning how to use the program and have made limited changes to it.
“The main thing we’re doing right now is giving them confidence to use it,” he said.
Reach the reporter at vajones2@asu.edu.
