This week, we started working closely with the Los Angeles Fire Department, CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort), and the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office to vaccinate 10,000+ people per day, provide digital vaccination cards, and collect and integrate the necessary data with state and local registries.
This wasn’t the initial plan. In fact, we weren’t involved until this past week, when we heard that the City of L.A. was struggling with another technology product. The government didn’t know it yet, but we’d already built the solution that would come to the rescue.
From our experience delivering high-quality clinical care at a low operating cost, we had figured out that a large-scale vaccination effort would require substantial technological lift. Anticipating that this could be a challenge for the public sector, we tried to contact state and federal governments to offer our help, but the response was always a “don’t worry, we’ve got it” attitude.
Then, around Christmas, we realized that all the vaccines were being shipped to local counties, but the counties had been left to figure out everything else by themselves. It was disappointing, but unsurprising, that there were no centralized systems being built to manage this process.
In response to the demo, they asked us, “Can you go live in two days?” 34 hours later, we launched the registration page.
Anticipating a breakdown, we decided to divert all of our product resources to building an end-to-end system that would help local government operations. We were taking a risk here because no one was asking for our help — yet.
Then, on January 9, we contacted the City of L.A. about the tech problems we’d heard they were having. We learned that the technology they were using was crashing, creating a huge source of friction for the amazing frontline people. We offered to show them a demo of something that might help.
Within hours, we were presenting what we’d designed to the Mayor’s office and the teams that were running the vaccination effort.
As soon as they saw our demo, they were shocked to see a comprehensive, elegant solution built precisely for what they were doing. The government had never posted an RFP for vendors to build something; instead, we had anticipated their need and built what was required without asking for permission.
In response to the demo, they asked us, “Can you go live in two days?”
34 hours later, we launched the registration page. Over the next week, we started deploying the rest of our platforms one by one.
Within a few days, we deployed the system that’s now running the process from end to end:
Now, the LA fire department and the hundreds of volunteers working with CORE can focus on what they’re best at, which is helping people on the ground.
It’s fair to say the local government has been very appreciative of our help. We have been able to reduce the chaos and increase throughput significantly.
Thanks to this experience, we’re launching a new experiment within Carbon: a public health division. I’m envisioning a team staffed with great product managers, engineers, data scientists, and designers, as well as people who deeply understand the challenges of local governments.
This will be different from the usual government vendor model. Typically, governments publish some requirements in an RFP, and vendor companies respond to them and try to win the project. We’ll be working the other way around: we’ll try to anticipate what the government will need in terms of public health efforts, and start building the software and technology that we would build if we were running public health. Then, we’ll pitch the products to the government, showing them what we think they’ll be able to use. We’ll supplement our technology with services (customer support, data, operations oversight, etc.) that we can spawn more quickly and cheaply than they can.
In my experience, there are a lot of competent people involved in government, both in rank and file. They’re keenly aware of their needs, but the setup of the government makes it difficult to execute. All we need to do is have a team that can actively engage with people in local governments and ideate with fewer boundaries.
We know there are certain privatization efforts that have gone wrong, most notably private prison systems. We plan to study those and design a culture that constitutionally avoids making the same mistakes.
If you’re an idealistic technologist who wants to work for the public good, but you’re afraid of not being able to produce output at the pace you’d prefer, then drop us a line. This might be an interesting middle-ground for you, where you’ll be able to work in a faster-paced setting while making a direct impact on public health.
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Thanks to my colleagues at Carbon Health:
Clinicians: Sujal Mandavia
Engineering Team: Murat Akbal, Matthew Wollerman, Rory Roccio
Product Team: Fahm Seaturn
Clinical Informatics: Haritha Atluri