NCH’s online vaccine appointment system causes frustration

An error message creating frustration and worry among people, and all they were trying to do is get a COVID-19 vaccine.

NCH opened hundreds of vaccine appointments Thursday, only to face major issues with the website. Making it even worse: no one could get through to the hospital system for answers.

For many of you, times are lonely. Some like North Naples resident Ann Adams have jumped at every chance to get the vaccine. She hoped NCH would be her saving grace when their website opened up at noon.

“Click next, click next, and I kept doing it and was doing great and I was ecstatic, that I made it to get this vaccine because I’m 75,” and then she had trouble.

“I reverified that I was not a robot at least 20 times and kept clicking submit, and I don’t know. Do I have an appointment? Don’t I have an appointment?”

Michael Wascom tried to get his 75-year-old mother an appointment. He got pretty far, until he actually went to choose the appointment time.

“I received an error message, and after many attempts to overcome that error message …
all the appointments were fully booked.”

NCH blamed the website problems on an influx of traffic. All 1,200 of its appointments filled up in just 10 minutes.

Adams was not one of them.

“I know I’m not the only one, there’s thousands of us. Thousands of us that are going through the same thing and what does somebody do?”