McHenry County Department of Health expands COVID-19 vaccine call center to keep up with high volume

After launching its vaccine call center Feb. 3, the McHenry County Department of Health received 3,323 calls in about the first two weeks from residents eager to be vaccinated against COVID-19, department spokeswoman Lindsey Salvatelli said.

Health department officials soon realized they would need to expand to keep up with calls from residents who have questions about the vaccine or who are unable to enroll online because they do not have access to the internet, Salvatelli said.

“We want to be able to provide that service to them and get those questions answered as quickly as possible,” Salvatelli said in an interview Thursday. “And also just to give them that connection, right? I think that’s another thing that people have been talking about this entire pandemic is that lack of a human connection. We want them to be able to call us and hear a voice on the other end.”

The call center has been working to increase its four-person team to eight with the help of federal grant money flowing through the McHenry County Workforce Network, Public Health Administrator Melissa Adamson said in an interview Wednesday.

It is currently operating with a team of five, with a sixth person in training, Salvatelli said.

After outgrowing its home in the health department’s administrative office, the call center moved Wednesday into the McHenry County Mental Health Board’s office space in Crystal Lake, Salvatelli said.

The need for a call center as another option to sign up to receive the COVID-19 vaccine has been present since before the county began its vaccine distribution on Dec. 27. The online site to enroll for notifications about the vaccine was launched Dec. 17.

Salvatelli said health department officials have been taking calls to enroll residents since well before the official launch of the call center Feb. 3. They knew there was a need for a call center dedicated specifically to the task and initially planned to launch it the week before, she said.

“I just think that the timing of getting it all together, having it planned out and it actually kind of moved a couple of times before it came to rest” in the current location, she said. “That’s part of the reason that it began in February.”

The call center has been crucial for some of the county’s less tech-savvy residents, those without reliable access to the internet and residents who may not be strong English speakers, Salvatelli said.

“We do have translation services available,” she said. “People [for whom] English might not be their first language, they can call us up, and we can get them connected and enrolled.”

The health department takes the same approach in extending invitations to schedule vaccine appointments over the phone as it does with residents who enroll online, Salvatelli said. It randomly selects email addresses, or callers, within the priority group or subgroup that currently is being served, which right now is residents who are 65 and older.

As the health department expands the call center, it also is working out some kinks to better serve residents, Salvatelli said.

In a meeting of the McHenry County Board of Health on Monday, Adamson said the county’s software does not put callers on hold if all staff are busy serving other callers. Instead, callers typically hear a busy tone before being transferred to the center’s voicemail.

This can be frustrating for residents and leads to a high volume of voicemails that call center staff must respond to in a timely manner on top of their other daily duties, Adamson said. This is especially true on Monday mornings, when staff must respond to all of the voicemails left over the weekend.

“By having more people, we’ll be able to roll those calls to more people, and there will be less waiting, and they’ll get to a human faster,” she said.

The system also has a capacity limit for how many voicemails it can handle at once, and it requires messages to be stored for a certain period of time before they can be fully deleted, meaning some callers are unable to leave a voicemail, Salvatelli said. In that situation, she recommended that residents call again at another time.

“These are things that we’re trying to troubleshoot along the way,” she said. “Lots of different ways to address those have come up, and we are trying different things out.”

The health department has been talking about using additional staff members to expand the call center’s operating hours to avoid a backlog of calls, which could include the addition of some limited weekend hours, Salvatelli said.

The call center can be reached at 815-334-4045 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Salvatelli said the best time to call is about 2 p.m., when there typically is a lull in calls.