ITWorx Simplifies Flu Shot Scheduling for City of Ottawa

In partnership with the people and communities of Ottawa, Ottawa Public Health improves and advocates for health and well-being through prevention, promotion, and protection. OPH delivers public health services, including health protection, disease and injury prevention, control of communicable diseases, family health services, responding to public health services, and monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting public health data.

The OPH unit runs influenza immunization clinics every year to protect Ottawa residents from the flu during the winter season. The clinics were exclusively walk-in with no ability to plan specific appointments for individuals and families. In addition to extensive delays for frustrated residents waiting to be inoculated, OPH was also unable to resource the clinics effectively due to a lack of information about demands for each clinic, leading to inappropriate staffing and vaccine shortages. OPH needed a smooth and seamless solution to automate and manage this tedious and time-consuming task.

Under a partnership with Innovus Corp., ITWorx provided OPH with Visit ManagementTM, a robust, integrated, and cost-effective bilingual product for managing appointment booking. It made it easy for OPH to quickly automate, streamline, and improve their booking processes by allowing residents to instantly schedule their vaccination appointments online instead of calling in or sending an email. Ottawa residents accessed Visit Management through the web to book an appointment and receive alerts and notifications. Visit Management only requires an internet connection to use, with no downloads, installations, or additional hardware and can be accessed from smartphones and tablets. Once an appointment is booked, the patient receives appointment reminders via email and/or SMS. Besides the convenience for residents, Visit Management freed up valuable time for managers and employees as they no longer needed to continually answer the phone or manage appointments manually. It helped OPH administrators efficiently monitor, manage, and control resources and influenza vaccination queues more effectively through resource and queue management capabilities. In addition, supervisors were able to manage all facility, nursing, and medical volunteers’ tasks, walk-in, and crisis management processes. Built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, easy customization enabled Visit Management to match OPH’s services and locations. Flexible rule-setting allowed OPH to define business rules for appointments such as service time, check in, resource capacity, and free time slots allocation. The software also syncs with Microsoft Outlook, adding additional functionalities. Moreover, the system provides visually-informative dashboards,

including daily activity reports and a variety of high-level campaign status views, to enable facility managers to efficiently and effectively control the entire cycle from appointment booking to vaccine administration. OPH Visit Management was provided as ‘Software as a Service.’ It was securely hosted at a local data center to cut down the cost of HW/SW and IT maintenance while providing the ability to dynamically scale infrastructure any time according to need. The system was launched to the residents of Ottawa on October 15, 2011, at fluclinicsottawa.ca.

• Convenient appointment booking
• Improved resourcing of clinics
• Shorter wait times for citizens
• Improved performance measurement
• Affordable and flexible infrastructure