State officials told CalMatters that they spent $50 million building the MyTurn COVID-19 vaccination website, and a majority of people have not used it to book their appointments.
President and Cofounder of Catalyst @ Health 2.0 Indu Subaiya said she believes a statewide system should not have been built end to end with controlled access points.
“In turn, I think we missed reaching a lot of people who didn’t have access to a website 24/7, who couldn’t have a smartphone, who basically felt lost in a very bulky system,” she told KCBS Radio.
Appointments booked on MyTurn account for only about 27% of the shots given each day across the state, according to data from the California Department of Public Health.
Subaiya said a better system would have required preregistration once, and followed up with people in real time when there was current availability at a site nearby.
“We have the ability to do that now with geolocation and with all of the modalities at our fingertips to reach folks, and we just really tried to do a one size fits all approach instead,” she noted.
This required a different approach, Subaiya said, adding that she wasn’t knocking Salesforce, which developed MyTurn. She said startups should have been given a chance.
“We put up a call in upstate New York for startups to help with vaccine technologies, and over 30 companies responded,” she added. “Not all of them could do all pieces of the puzzle, but they could certainly work together. I think had we taken more of that approach we could have saved money, had more negotiating power with the vendor and served our constituents better.”
She suggested that a better approach would have been to plug into vaccine inventory, and have manufacturers report where vaccines are available and how the public could find them.
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