SC will soon make it easier to sign up for COVID-19 vaccinations. Here’s how
Update: The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is piloting its new vaccine registration system. It can be found here.
Navigating South Carolina’s complex rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is already a challenge for 87-year-old Georgia Boswell.
The registration process hinges on internet access, a working email address and a confusing federal sign-up system. Boswell, who lives at Sun City Hilton Head, a sprawling retirement community in Beaufort and Jasper counties, has an iPad and Facebook account, but is relying on her daughter in North Carolina to help her get an appointment.
“My fingers just don’t know which buttons to push and I can’t think fast enough sometimes to digest everything that comes up,” said Boswell, adding that she may drive to Summerville for an appointment there. “I know it’s not just me.”
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control agrees. State officials are planning to launch a new online portal and call center later this week to help vulnerable S.C. residents, seniors and those without computers get vaccinated against COVID-19. An exact launch date is unknown.
DHEC officials expect to release details about the new registration process soon, like the call center’s phone number, said Dr. Brannon Traxler, the state’s interim director of public health.
The portal will allow Phase 1a members to find available S.C. appointments and register for them directly, cutting several steps out of the anxiety-producing process. The portal will ask users to provide an email address, but that step won’t block people from signing up, said Marshall Taylor, DHEC’s acting director, during testimony at the State House last Thursday.
More than 100 people will staff the new call center and can register people in the system if needed, according to DHEC.
That’s crucial for thousands of South Carolinians without a reliable connection to the internet.
Roughly 650,000 residents across the Palmetto State don’t have access to broadband internet, including more than 552,000 people living in rural areas, according to estimates from the Federal Communications Commission.
Those already eligible for inoculations currently use the online Vaccine Administration Management System, or VAMS, to book appointments at some hospitals. VAMS, which is run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has become a “cuss word” at DHEC, Taylor said.
“It is a clunky system. Nobody likes it. The hospitals don’t like it, the providers don’t like it, the users don’t like it, DHEC doesn’t like it,” Taylor told state lawmakers last Thursday. “This is not a good system.”
The CDC as of Tuesday hadn’t responded to Taylor’s remarks.
Residents need an invitation to access VAMS, so medical centers have been asking Phase 1a members to give them a working email address, before then putting those emails into a spreadsheet and uploading the file into VAMS.
After that, the CDC sends residents an email with a link to VAMS, where they can eventually look for appointments.
“One of the problems is the troubleshooting — when people put their emails in and they can’t get the follow-up email,” said Kelly Bouthillet, president of the board of directors at the S.C. Nurses Association, during a virtual forum with Beaufort County leaders earlier this month.
Warren Stern, 76, of Hilton Head Island, submitted his information on Jan. 13 to start the registration process, but later found the CDC email in his spam folder.
“That’s a big flaw,” said Stern, who eventually booked a Jan. 21 appointment at Coastal Carolina Hospital in Jasper County.
The process wasn’t too difficult, Stern said, once he was able to access VAMS.
The time-consuming issues described by Bouthillet, though, should be resolved with the state’s own registration system. People won’t need an invitation to register and won’t use VAMS.
The state bought the new sign-up system and modified it, said Keith Frost, incident commander for DHEC’s COVID-19 response, during the earlier virtual forum. A DHEC spokesperson on Tuesday didn’t immediately say how much the system cost.
And while DHEC already has a Care Line for vaccine questions, that phone number is used to field inquiries about other issues, too.
The vaccine-only call center will be better equipped to handle questions from thousands of S.C. seniors, as the demand for vaccines continues to outweigh the available supply, according to DHEC.
“It will be much more straightforward than VAMS,” Traxler said Monday.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 10:13 AM.
