Building a Better Vaccine Locator – with Google Maps and Spatial IQ
Objectives of work:
Through AppGeo’s Spatial IQ program, Pennsylvania’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) obtained the guidance and technical support they needed to migrate and improve an existing Vaccine Locator application. PA HHS had an existing Esri-based Vaccine Locator app that was having trouble keeping up with heavy loads of traffic. They reached out to AppGeo for assistance moving the app onto Google Maps for improved performance. The decision to leverage Google technology was made given the scalability of the Google Maps platform and ease with which new data could be flowed into the application.
“The folks at AppGeo did a great job on assessing our needs based on our limited knowledge with Google Maps. They provided clear solutions when needed, but they also provided us with general guidance so that we could attempt to solve the issues ourselves and save hours.” – State of Pennsylvania Health and Human Services
Activities, Phases completed by the AppGeo Team:
AppGeo’s technical team worked with HHS developers to address an urgent deadline to make the application scalable and performant. During 5 sessions, AppGeo identified the critical mapping capabilities, refined the data pipeline, and recommended the Google Maps platform components for the PA HHS team to use. The new approach took advantage of the strengths that the Google platform provides (Google Maps JavaScript API) when delivering timely and up-to-date location intelligence.
“I just want to say that it was a pleasure working with the folks at AppGeo. They are experts in their field…I highly recommend them.” – State of Pennsylvania Health and Human Services
After the revised application was deployed by PA DHSS staff, AppGeo scheduled a follow-up meeting, a service provided by the Spatial IQ program, to review one months worth of usage data. AppGeo was able to identify additional API usage guidance to minimize API usage and also improve performance.
AppGeo’s Spatial IQ Managed Services program allowed PA DHHS to more quickly deploy a performant application to aid in vaccine distribution; and with AppGeo’s guidance on optimization, they were able to avoid overspending on API services.
The State needed an agile solution and was able to execute quickly and meet the basic communication requirements for their citizens even before being able to switch to Vaccines.gov, the federally-funded vaccine locator managed by the CDC.
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