2021 saw an incredible increase in interest in vaccinations. Not just COVID19 vaccines, but vaccines of all types across the board. The vaccination conversation for better and worse has become much louder. As we’ve reignited the discussion for vaccine benefits – protecting oneself and their community against communicable and deadly diseases, we’ve also seen a shift in how people are looking for vaccinations.
The early part of this shift actually happened during the 2020 flu season – more demand for flu vaccines from patients looking to avoid flu complications during a COVID wave – and shortages of those vaccines due to the mismatch in supply. As a pilot with Immunize Canada we launched MyFluShot.ca as a way to allow vaccinators to provide transparency into their availability and supply, and for patients to find, join a waitlist, and book flu vaccines.
Based on this success we launched MyCovid19Vaccine.ca – as a dedicated service to allow Canadians to find and book available Covid Vaccinations – which saw incredible demand as the provincial governments rolled out vaccines to various cohorts of patients. It exposed the fact that nationally we as an industry can do a lot better in helping Canadian’s locate vaccinations, especially during times of high demand and limited supply. There were many attempts to address this inequity in our industry from government agencies to crowd sourced twitter feeds, but none of these were able to provide full transparency and visibility into all providers.
To help increase transparency and equity of vaccine delivery, we’ve evolved MyFluShot.ca and MyCovid19Vaccine.ca into simply MyVaccines.ca – a national vaccine locator for all vaccines. Our vision with this platform is to have vaccine availability and inventory data from all vaccinators across Canada, and to help all Canadian’s to find and book their next vaccination. This effort builds on the successful pilots and partnerships with organizations across the healthcare industry in Canada, and we need all vaccinators to use our easy to use tools to help us build on this vision.