VCF industry partnership to enhance online bookings and a seamless user experience

Published: 25 February 2022

The Vaccine Clinic Finder (Opens in new tab), formerly the Vaccine Eligibility Checker, is the Australian Government’s core piece of digital infrastructure to help the Australian population reach vaccination targets. It is based on the National Health Services Directory (Opens in new tab), allowing users to search for clinics near them, with an option to click-to-book an appointment for a COVID vaccination.

Initially, most vaccination clinics were not well integrated with the Vaccine Clinic Finder for online bookings and listed only a phone number for making an appointment. This put a heavy administrative load on practices dealing with thousands of phone calls and was not an ideal consumer experience, either.

To increase the number of practices featuring booking links in Vaccine Clinic Finder, Healthdirect Australia formed a successful partnership with the medical software industry along with the Commonwealth, based on co-design and collaboration.

Since the launch of Vaccine Clinic Finder in February 2021, it has been used 50 million times. As the pandemic continues to evolve, new vaccines and boosters become available, the Vaccine Clinic Finder also evolves to meet both government and consumer needs.

Soon, Australians seeking vaccinations will be able to use Vaccine Clinic Finder to locate clinics that offer wheelchair accessibility, walk-in availability and a greater number of clinics that offer free vaccinations to non-Medicare card holders.

As part of the education and engagement approach with clinical cohorts who use and interact with the Vaccine Clinic Finder product, Healthdirect established working relationships with a core group of clinical peak organisations representing General Practice and Pharmacies.

Work with the clinical peaks included education modules to encourage adoption and competency among GPs, Practice Managers and Pharmacists when using the Vaccine Clinic Finder and, more recently, the benefits of the GP and Pharmacy-specific self-managed Vaccine Clinic Finder Connect service.

Feedback has been extremely positive from participants who have interacted with educational modules, webinars and awareness raising communications from their respective peak bodies.

A list of those peak bodies and their online resources are provided below (please note clinical peak membership log-in is required to access some resources):

Last reviewed: March 2022