(2021-02-05) What Went Wrong With America's $44 Million Vaccine Data System

What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system? She was on the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s brand-new, $44 million website called VAMS—the Vaccine Administration Management System, built by the consulting firm Deloitte.

it was supposed to be a one-stop shop where employers, state officials, clinics, and individuals could manage scheduling, inventory, and reporting for covid-19 shots—and free for anyone to use.

Clinic workers in Connecticut, Virginia, and other states say the system is notorious for randomly canceled appointments, unreliable registration, and problems that lock staff out of the dashboard they’re supposed to use to log records.

In May, it gave the task to consulting company Deloitte, a huge federal contractor, with a $16 million no-bid contract to manage “covid-19 vaccine distribution and administration tracking.” In December, Deloitte snagged another $28 million for the project, again with no competition. The contract specifies that the award could go as high as $32 million, leaving taxpayers with a bill between $44 and $48 million.

To better understand the challenges facing people building these tools, I called Derrick Stone, a software development manager at UVA Health in Virginia. While the public health department is using VAMS, his organization is using VaxTrax, a tool built in house by Stone’s team two years ago to track employees’ mandatory flu vaccines

“A lot of what these systems do is trivial, but the task was undefined,” he says. “You had to try giving some shots, learn from it, and then figure out how to revise it to be more efficient. It really requires something flexible.”

“It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome. The ‘Next’ button is all the way down and to the right, so if you’re on a cell phone, you literally can’t see it,” says Rowe. “In the first round, people using VAMS mostly had advanced degrees. If you’re 75 and someone asks you to log into VAMS, there is zero way it’ll happen without help.”

Elderly people aren’t the only ones who will struggle if vaccination requires online sign-up. Language barriers will become a significant problem, especially for non-native English speakers doing high-risk essential work.

To some watchdogs, VAMS is the latest example of a broken system for building government technology. Deloitte has a long history of making malfunctioning things for state and federal governments: most recently, it was in the news for charging states hundreds of millions of dollars for unemployment websites that did not work.

Deloitte may be representative of a broken system, but it’s certainly not alone. CGI Federal, for instance, has landed over $5.6 billion in federal IT contracts since getting fired after its disastrous development of the Healthcare.gov website.