Door County Medical Center welcomes the opportunity to be of service in this unique time and we find it a privilege to partner with our community to continue the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. We want to take this opportunity to share what has been going on here at DCMC in conjunction with the State’s announcement on January 19 to include those 65+ in the phase 1B vaccination rollout.
DCMC anticipated the increase in demand that would be put upon our website and phone systems and put multiple measures in place to help with the anticipated flood of requests. More resources were put in place in the website operating system. However, despite those efforts, we still reached the capacity once the online vaccination form was put into production the afternoon of January 20th.
Subsequently, when the website became overloaded, we then had patients calling the publicized phone number for our “Covid Vaccination Hotline” looking to have their name put on the schedule. This caused all of our available lines to fill up. When this occurred, we were unable to receive and make outbound calls for a short amount of time at the main DCMC Campus.
A decision was quickly made to “turn off” the Covid Vaccination Hotline number to allow our telecommunications to get back online for the hospital and our patients. Furthermore, we did a “reboot” of the Covid Hotline number due to having several patients on hold waiting to talk to a DCMC employee. Rebooting this hotline number allowed us to clear up all additional lines in our telecommunications.
Despite all of this occurring, we still had a VERY SUCCESSFUL debut of the online vaccination form. Within 12 hours of the online form going live, we had 3500 of folks in the 1B category complete the form! We are anticipating that roughly 8,000 residents in our service area will fall into this current phase, which officially begins Monday, January 25. This is an absolutely exceptional turnout so far, and also proves that our community is onboard with the vaccine.
DCMC has been operating in an all-hands-on-deck mode and we currently have a team of over 30 people working to schedule everyone who completed the online vaccination form as soon as possible, but it is likely that appointments will be scheduled several weeks in advance. Our partner in this mission, Door County Public Health is also offering Covid-19 vaccination clinics. It is important to note, however, even with both organizations working to their fullest extent, it will likely take two months to get everyone over 65 vaccinated.
We are very proud of the entire team at DCMC and the quick thinking that took place to meet the needs of our patients during this online vaccination form rollout. There has been a lot of behind the scenes work over the last few weeks to bring this vision to fruition. We’ve also learned a great deal from this experience and will make improvements to our infrastructure and administrative processes going further as new vaccination phases are announced.
Thank you for allowing us to help the fight against Covid-19, and thank you for doing your part to keep yourself and loved ones safe. We must remember, still, that safe practices are encouraged as we work through the subsequent vaccination groups.
Your partner in the fight against Covid-19 -
Door County Medical Center