B.C. health officials expect to have a long awaited online COVID-19 vaccine booking system in place by April 6.

Dr. Penny Ballem, the executive lead for B.C.’s vaccination rollout team, says until then people will still have to call their health authority’s call centre like they’ve been doing for the past two weeks, though she notes the wait times have all but disappeared.

“On April 6, we will do the shift over and we will close down those five call centres and those numbers and we will move to one call centre and one very robust online booking platform and the public will then start to be able to access wherever they are that online or [through] the call centre,” she said.

“The transformation and transition to the provincial digital platform is a tricky business. “The five call centres in the health authorities will continue to schedule people right up to April 18, and get them scheduled in all these clinics around the province.”

Ballem says the new provincial booking system will be ‘robust’ and the benefits will be ‘massive’.

“It will allow people to go in and register pretty much at any time. It will then allow you to schedule an appointment, and then it will actually run our clinics,” she said. “And finally it will be a remarkable tool for us to track how we are doing.”

“It will provide an opportunity a few months down the road for the public to access their vaccine records and for physicians and pharmacists to actually make sure they are able to access those supplies when they are seeing patients.”

She attributed the improved performance to a streamlining of the province’s vaccine rollout to people in a born in a single year, instead of five-year increments all at once.

“We’re scheduling even more people every day,” Ballem said. “So, segmentation of the age groups seems pretty practical and simple … It’s really about protecting our public from having to wait in long queues that are not necessary.”

People between the age of 75 and 79 will be able to start booking vaccines this Saturday. The provincial registration and booking system will be available starting with people between the age of 65 and 69.

Earlier this week, Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, said the online system was still a few weeks away because health officials wanted we wanted to make sure it worked well.

“It has to be interoperable with many other systems and most importantly, from my perspective, is it gets everybody’s information into our provincial immunization registry so that you have a record, we have a record…but also its really importantly as that is our safety monitoring system as well,” she said.

Fraser Health was the only health authority that had that an online booking system ready when people began to make vaccine appointments on March 8. All five health authority phone lines were flooded with people trying to book appointments that day, but Ballem says there are mechanisms in place to prevent the new website from crashing.

“I think we all experienced the call centre issues we had on the first day of our rollout, which is a very typical experience across our country and other jurisdictions around the world,” Ballem added. “When you first open up your clinics to the general public, they’re very enthusiastic, and that’s good news. We want them to want to get vaccinated and to be getting in there to get an appointment, but it really challenges the technology of call centres and online registration.”

Health officials say everyone who is eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine will be able to get a first dose before July 1.