Vaximap: route optimisation for housebound vaccination

During the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign, general practitioners (GPs) have held responsibility for vaccinating housebound patients. This presented them with a large, complex and unfamiliar logistical challenge, namely determining the most time-efficient route to visit multiple patients at their home address. In response to a lack of existing solutions tailored specifically to vaccination, and in light of overwhelming demand, Vaximap (https://www.vaximap.org) was created in January 2021 to automate the process of route planning. It is free of charge for all users and has been used to-date to plan vaccinations for over 470,000 patients. This article analyses usage data to estimate the time savings (3 work years) and financial savings (£110,000) the service has yielded for GP surgeries, thus demonstrating that it helped to accelerate the UK’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign at critical moments.