Jake Coppinger / Blog /How I helped ~6,000 Australians find a vaccine appointment
Last updated: Feb 21st, 2022
In mid 2021 Australia had an acute vaccine shortage for various reasons, which meant vaccine
appointments were extremely hard to come by - NSW had just declared a national emergency.
To help Australia increase it's vaccination rate ASAP I built
GPVaccineSearch.com over a few weekends
in July/August, an open-source
(on Github) vaccine
appointment search engine, as a side project.
As of Jan 2022, 23k users visited the site, and 5,809 unique users started a HotDoc vaccine booking after using my site!
Reddit feedback“big shot lawyer people”
After the shortage eased in October 2021 and the government booking website improved traffic dropped off, but here is the story of how I built it!
Wanting to help Aussies get vaccinated as soon as possible, I searched for every possible data source (and considered
crowd-sourcing phone call responses). I found that HotDoc (a Melbourne healthcare booking company)
had lots of data on available bookings but had not yet built a way to search across clinics
for the soonest appointments.
Always keen for a side project I managed to deploy a headless Chromium instance to AWS Lambda to
walk through GPs near the user and find appointment times, and soon had a working demo. As you can
imagine, I was concerned about the load this would add to the HotDoc site and resources to run it
so I added strong rate limiting, but it's hard to emphasize how in demand vaccines were at the
time - I had friends asking me via social media to run queries for their location!
After posting on Reddit and sharing with a few friends, almost 2800 people visited on the first day.
The most requested feature was searching by postcode rather than geo-location: once I implemented
that I found most users preferred using that option. The Pfizer vaccine also became available via
GPs which further added to the surge of visitors.
I got in contact with a friend of a friend working at HotDoc so I could make sure they were
comfortable with myself using their data and API.
They were happy with the project and agreed my rate limiting threshold was well chosen, and
submitted a PR so they could track referrals. Altogether the experience of communicating with HotDoc
was excellent - they also emphasised how committed they are to helping Australians access vaccines.
After vaccines became more widely available visitors dropped off, though a smaller second wave
visited when I added booster search support.
All up
Overall this was one of my favourite side projects I've built - it was a lot of fun to try and
throw my hat in the ring to make this problem a bit easier to solve. It really meant a lot to me
that I managed to help a few people in the process. Thanks for reading!
I think it's important to acknowledge the number of people who used gpvaccinesearch.com pales
in comparison to how many people found their vaccines using HotDoc itself - they've built a
truly brilliant product.
Currently, a side project I'm working on is Gatho (gatho.party),
a platform for hosting small events. It supports one click RSVP links for guests, and can
integrate with a Matrix group chat. It's open source and works great, let me know what you think!
Some more graphs of gpvaccinesearch.com, because everybody loves graphs!
