Vaccellent

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the urgent need to vaccinate a global population presented significant logistical challenges. To address this, a small cross-functional team within Siemens Healthineers embarked on developing Vaccellent, a novel product aimed at digitalizing the vaccine supply chain.

I was one of two designers, alongside Joanna Pruchnicka , supporting the team in envisioning and crafting a clear product definition. Through journey maps and collaborative workshops, we identified key user needs and pain points within the vaccine distribution process. I then translated these insights into tangible mockups and prototypes, which helped drive decisions regarding feature prioritization and scope for the development team.

Vaccellent addressed several critical challenges faced by stakeholders involved in the vaccination effort:

• Managing Vaccine Distribution Effectively: Empowering public health authorities to make data-driven decisions through adaptive AI-based analytics, optimizing vaccine allocation and distribution.
• Operating Vaccination Procedures Efficiently: Streamlining patient scheduling and simplifying vaccine inventory management to optimize clinical workflows and reduce administrative burden.
• Coordinating Doses, Dates, Patients, and Places: Seamlessly bringing together real-time data related to vaccination operations with high transparency, ensuring efficient coordination between various stakeholders.

Recognizing the strain on regional health facilities, we developed Vaccellent Operations – a suite of tools including a patient scheduling app and an operations dashboard for healthcare providers.

The scheduling app offered a simple and intuitive step-by-step registration flow, prioritizing accessibility and ease of use for patients.

For healthcare facilities, the operations dashboard provided essential information regarding vaccination appointments, inventory levels, and patient records, allowing for efficient management of vaccination procedures.

A unique aspect of Vaccellent we were exploring was the ability to optimize vaccine distribution using AI-based modeling and simulations. This would provide public health authorities with data-driven insights into the potential impact of different distribution scenarios on infection rates and other key metrics, enabling them to make informed decisions and allocate resources effectively.

I worked closely with the product management and engineering teams to translate the complex capabilities of the AI algorithms into clear and intuitive visualizations and workflows within the Vaccellent Dashboard.

Despite facing challenges such as constrained timelines, limited resources, and a rapidly evolving environment, the team successfully developed a compelling solution with Vaccellent. In the limited release of Vaccellent Operations, the product received positive feedback from users, highlighting its intuitive design and efficiency in managing vaccination processes.

Unfortunately because of the evolving operational and political climate around vaccines, Vaccellent has been discontinued. But parts of the system we developed continue to be in use internally to support vaccination efforts in Siemens Healthineers and other partner companies. Other systems are being reshaped to broaden their area of use and will likely find life in new settings.

In the limited time that Vaccellent was available, it received favorable reviews. A partner working with early versions of the Vaccellent system in the Vaccination Center at Erlangen, Germany had the following to say -