Beaumont Patient Portal crashes from COVID-19 vaccine demand

FOX 2 - The response for the COVID-19 vaccine has been so overwhelming, the Beaumont Patient Portal crashed after people rushed the site to register for the next round of COVID-19 vaccines. 

"The issue is because we don’t have a lot of time to set this up, we only can contact people electronically, so you can imagine what that’s doing to the servers," said Jeffrey Fischgrund, chief clinical services at Beaumont.

 
The site was up and down as of Friday with the announcement that Beaumont will start vaccinating the 1-B category made up of people 65 and up, frontline workers, first responders and K through 12 teachers.
 
"We have never done this before," Fischgrund said. "Nobody in the country has ever done this before. What we didn’t want to do was wait until this is perfect. We need to get shots in arms." 
 
The hospital system sent out one million emails to patients already for registration instructions. Once you’re registered online on a first-come, first-serve, basis. They’ll start vaccinating early next week at a central location. 
 
"We can now vaccinate 3200 people per day but we know we need to be bigger than that," he said.
 
The state just notified Beaumont they’d be getting this load of the vaccine two days ago, so, patient communication is all electronic for now. Eventually, there will be a hotline and two additional vaccination sites. 
 
"This is totally based on how many vaccines the state can give us and we can’t schedule people two or three weeks out, because we don’t know if we will have the vaccine," Fischgrund said.
 
They are asking for patience from patients.