 Welcome to Public Good App House. My name is Aretha Simons from TechSoup. Today we have some amazing people who are going to share some creative tech solutions to address COVID-19 and other health demands in the community. Let's welcome Jeff Eiden, who is currently the head of product and crisis response at Twilio.org. Twilio focused on ensuring that everyone who is in the crisis get the help they need when they need it. Thanks everyone for joining today. I'm sure so many of you in the audience are in the midst of doing the critical work of ensuring that more people, and especially those who are most vulnerable, can get access to COVID-19 vaccines as quickly as possible. And you're here because you're investing in technology to accelerate that effort. So in these next five minutes, I'm gonna show you an app that the Twilio.org team built to help get more shots and arms in the US with an emphasis on equity. And at the end, I'll also share how Twilio can support the work your organizations are doing in the vaccine rollout effort moving forward. It may feel like a distant memory now, but just a few months ago, vaccine supply in the US was still extremely limited. In the month of February, we were just starting to see eligibility open up to prioritized high-risk groups like people with health conditions and those living in long-term care facilities. The problem was, however, as we know, administration of the vaccines wasn't being managed at the federal level, but rather by a patchwork of providers at the state and local level, each with slightly different eligibility rules and processes for getting vaccinated. And what this did was created a situation where on one hand, you had many anxious residents, especially those in high-risk groups who wanted to know when they could get the vaccine. And on the other hand, you had every state and local health agency scrambling to figure out how to get those people to the vaccine based on changing eligibility over time. So as we started observing these challenges in real time, we recognized an opportunity for digital engagement to help, as well as an opportunity to create reusable tools to prevent each one of these health organizations from reinventing the wheel. So we asked ourselves specifically how we could help health organizations connect with any resident the moment they became eligible to be vaccinated. And our goal was twofold. One, empowering these organizations to get shots and arms as quickly as possible in accordance with their specific vaccine prioritization process. And two, empowering residents to feel more in control and at ease while they waited for their turn and also the confidence to know that they'd get notified when they did become eligible. To accomplish this, we created a template application that allowed healthcare organizations to quickly spin up a vaccine registration program using Twilio SMS. Residents could text into a number or a short code, which would kick off an automated chat bot. The bot would ask the resident a series of demographic questions that each correlated to eligibility groups identified by the CDC. And all this data would be stored for these organizations to use to notify them later on as eligibility opened up. You can get a sense of what the user experiences like for the residents from this prerecorded demo on the right here. They receive a welcome message, they confirm their interest in registering, and then they begin to answer basic questions like their name, age, and zip code. The bot then asks whether the resident is considered an essential worker, if she works from home, whether she lives in a congregate setting or whether she has a preexisting health condition. All of this data will then get passed to the health agency to determine their eligibility and notify that person when it's their turn to get vaccinated. Given Ruby, our test resident here, is an essential worker and she's 65 years old, she would likely be prioritized within the first few phases of the vaccine rollout where she lives. You'll also notice that there are some placeholders for data specific to the organization deploying the chat bot. That's because this template is really meant to be customized to meet the specific needs of each organization that uses it. This chat bot is powered by what we call a Twilio Studio Flow and that's shown on the left here that can be configured or extended by each organization that deploys the template. So for instance, one of the health agencies that's using the template could update the bot to link to state specific definitions of an essential worker. What we've seen is hundreds of developers deploying the vaccine standby app, representing health organizations across the country. In turn, these organizations have been able to get many more people, especially those who were most at risk, notified when it was their turn to get the COVID vaccine, which of course means more shots in arms, lives saved and progress towards herd immunity. It's been inspiring to see the number of fully vaccinated people rising steadily in the US and meeting people where they are, using digital channels of communication has definitely contributed to this progress. But of course, we all know there is so much more work to be done. Many populations in low to middle income countries don't yet have vaccines available to them and vaccine hesitancy and misinformation is fast becoming a major barrier to uptake where supply does exist. So my call to action for you all, if you are a nonprofit that is doing work relevant to COVID vaccines, we at Twilio want to support you. We recently launched our largest ever open call grant round of $11 million in monetary grants and product credits to support organizations providing education and equitable access to COVID vaccines. So I encourage you to apply at twilio.org slash impact fund. Or if you'd like to speak with a team member for help integrating digital engagement into your vaccine program, please reach out to our team at team at twilio.org. Thank you all so much.