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Vaccination Scheduling Vendor Billed State For Almost $500,000

Massachusetts' vaccine appointment site crashed Thursday morning, just as many became eligible to register for appointments. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Massachusetts' vaccine appointment site crashed Thursday morning, just as many became eligible to register for appointments. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

The Maryland-based software company whose technology played a role in the state's COVID-19 vaccine scheduling system fiasco last week appears to have cost Massachusetts almost half a million dollars, according to the Baker administration.

PrepMod, an offshoot of the Maryland Partnership For Prevention and Multi-State Partnership for Prevention that says it is "the state's biggest online appointment vendor," accepted responsibility for the chaos that ensued when about one million more people became eligible to get a vaccine appointment last Thursday, though other systems are believed to have failed as well. The state's COVID-19 Command Center provided a bundle of documents related to the contract with PrepMod to the News Service on Monday afternoon.

A purchase order dated Aug. 21, 2020, billed the Department of Public Health's Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences $318,000 for "Enterprise Resource Planning Bundle and Services and Support."

A separate document labeled as a quote indicates that the "Enterprise Resource Planning" bundle includes PrepMod, a clinic management system and an online consent form, and that the price tag includes a "statewide, lifetime user license" and one year of technical support.

A subsequent purchase order, this one dated Jan. 7, bills the BIDLS a total of $120,531. That total is split between $43,086 for a "Maryland Partnership for Prevention Project Manager" and $77,445 for "Maryland Partnership for Prevention Senior Development." In each case, the payments appear to be for three months of work.

In sum, the two purchase orders detail $438,531 worth of costs due to PrepMod or its parent organizations. The administration also provided a copy of the business associate and confidentiality agreement between DPH and the Multi-State Partnership for Prevention, which lays out expectations around data privacy and storage.

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