Three sisters have launched a Massachusetts coronavirus website to alert people of open vax appointments, yet another local effort to help strangers with the state’s aggravating sign-up system.
The Gabrieli sisters from Beverly started a website that pings people when vaccination slots go live. After people sign up on the website — called MA COVID Vaccine Finder — they receive email alerts immediately when appointments are available.
Almost 1,000 people have signed up for the alerts in about a week since the sisters launched the website out of their living room.
“Finding an appointment shouldn’t be a full-time job, and it can’t be for so many people,” said Lilla Gabrieli, 23. “So many people are struggling to get appointments, so we wanted to build something that would help them, and make the process as convenient and easy as possible.”
The sisters started this effort after they were frustrated — like so many across the state — with the constant website refreshing to get their mother a vaccination appointment.
“We were thinking, ‘There has to be an easier way,’ ” Gabrieli said.
As a result, they created MA COVID Vaccine Finder, which brings the sign-up process to the person by emailing them when vaccine appointments go live.
“We wanted to bring this to the people,” she said. “We’re always on our email during the pandemic, so these alerts go right to peoples’ emails within a minute.”
The three sisters pooled their skills to come up with this website and alert system. Lilla, a master’s degree student at the Oxford Internet Institute, has experience in computer science; Polly, 24, is a master’s degree student in bioinformatics at Harvard University; and Abigail, 26, works on policy and web design at MassEquality.
The program they created pulls batches of vaccination appointments and alerts users within a minute. The users are notified with a link when 15 or more slots are posted.
Moving forward, the sisters are working on adding geographic alerts to limit a person’s alerts to only locations they want. Also, they’re looking at adding CVS and Walgreens appointments to the system, and implementing text alerts.
“We’re building the plane as we fly,” Lilla said.
They’ve been self-funding the costs for the system, and are now trying to raise money for new features, including text alerts. They started a GoFundMe page called MA COVID Vaccine Finder.
To sign up for the vaccination appointment alerts, visit www.macovidvaccinefinder.org.
Other efforts to help Massachusetts residents with the vaccine sign-up system include: an Arlington software developer built an online vaccination platform, macovidvaccines.com, where people can clearly see which vaccination providers have open slots; a Somerville software engineer created a Twitter account,@vaccinetime, that immediately alerts people when new slots go live; and a Somerville woman on maternity leave started a volunteer group to directly book appointments, www.macovidvaxhelp.com, on behalf of strangers.
