Toronto tech startup hopes to make staffing a breeze at Sudbury vaccine sites

Vaccine clinics in northern Ontario may be getting a hand from a tech company in Toronto.

BookJane, a Toronto-based startup, is hoping its new app will help health care teams coordinate staffing once vaccine clinics get fully underway in northern Ontario.

Public Health Sudbury & Districts currently has five sites in operation across the region, but as more vaccines roll out it's expected the number of places offering the vaccine will increase.

The province is also saying it will announce which pharmacies in the region are able to administer the vaccines in the coming weeks.

Michael Li, vice-president of BookJane, said the app uses technology to deploy staff to health care facilities, including long-term care homes, hospitals, or in Sudbury's case, vaccine clinics.

"We're using technology via a mobile app to be able to deploy workers out to these facilities quickly, as opposed to them having to pick up email or a phone call or something much slower," Li said. "We can do hundreds of thousands of people instantaneously at the same time."

The biggest challenge in getting the vaccines into arms is ensuring there's enough people in the workforce to make it run efficiently, Li said.

"We know that the vaccine supplies are changing rapidly as we speak, where things change on the fly and what you really need is a technology and tools to help professionals," Li said.

"Because what you don't want them to deal with is 'where am I going for a given week at a time?'"

"[Workers] can just work with their phones and say, 'oh, this is where I'm going,' Spend about a couple seconds to know where they're going and then focus on the task at hand, which is really delivering the vaccines."

The BookJane app is currently being used by Public Health Sudbury & Districts.

The health unit said in a statement that it expects the app to be in full use by staff April 1, in time for Phase 2 of the vaccine roll out.