Sunday’s digital church bulletin included a section on how church staff can assist elderly congregants in signing up for the various COVID vaccine waitlists that are available to them. This week’s New Yorker includes a short article about a woman who calls herself a ‘vaccine yenta’ and spends her days sifting through online portals to help elderly people schedule appointments in the Kafkaesque digital maze.
I spent the better part of last week trying to schedule vaccines for my grandparents, familiarizing myself with every Rite Aid and health system within several hours of Ann Arbor. It was a nightmare. Even when vaccines are available, websites crash, or pages get stuck loading. I take pride in my ability to get through these types of systems, but even I was defeated.
Miraculously, by Sunday afternoon, both of my unvaccinated grandparents (my dad’s parents got their second doses last Thursday) received the long-awaited email from their hospital system and scheduled their appointments for the coming week. Still, they did not exactly have rave reviews.
“They call it public health,” my grandpa said yesterday, “but it’s like the website is in a foreign language. You might as well schedule a vaccine in Spanish.”
This is the condition of public service technology in this country. Scientists spent the last year pulling a miracle vaccine out of thin air and handed the process off to a patchwork of government agencies and regional pharmacy chains. That patchwork has set up a decentralized system of barely-functional web portals and left a generation with limited internet access to fend for themselves.
This is the kind of mediocrity in public service technology to which Americans have become accustomed. The vaccine is just another instance of it. We see it in our unbelievably ineffective unemployment insurance systems, our half-privatized income tax filing system, our slipshod government websites, and frankly in most of the situations in which we interact with our government.
We are led to believe that we should expect mediocre public service technology because anything else is impossible or far too expensive — that applying for unemployment insurance, titling a vehicle, or getting a replacement Social Security card has to be a horrible, dehumanizing experience because government is bad and this is a fact of life.
I refuse to believe that this is so. There is no reason that Americans — who have come to expect flawless technology and untold convenience from private entities like Am*zon — should settle for anything less from their government.
Good systems and services are within easy reach and Americans deserve them.
Detroiters can dial up a very functional hotline and schedule a vaccine appointment with ease because the City knows that’s the best way to make the vaccine available to the people who need it. Dutch citizens can contact the Public Information Service through any of five channels to get their questions on just about anything answered. In the UK, the Government Digital Service is transforming service delivery by applying simple principles, like “Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns.”
Investing in a good user experience for government makes a huge difference for the governments themselves and for the people whom they serve. Great government services can make interactions with government more than just un-soul-killing. Great government services can make interactions with government delightful.
Until very recently, I handled constituent services for State Rep. Darrin Camilleri in Michigan. Any one of 90,000 people in Detroit’s southern suburbs could call me up, tell me about their problem with state government, and I would do my best to make it right. Most elected officials at the state and federal level have staff that do the same thing. All of them (one hopes, at least) have the same goal: to make working with government a delightful experience for anybody who contacts them.
When everything else falls to pieces, constituent services staff are on the front lines. They take calls, answer questions, and liaise with departments. They are the kind face of a cold bureaucracy. Even in the best situations, though, they do their work with long days and brute force. They are not exempt from the shambolic state of public service technology in this country. Many keep track of their work through a series of notebooks and Excel spreadsheets. Even the lucky ones — usually in congressional offices — have been stuck with technology developed by defense contractors decades ago to manage their caseload.
Two weeks ago, I left my familiar world of government and non-profit work to join a team that’s working to fix that — starting with Congress and my home turf in the Michigan House of Representatives. The goal today is to give civil servants the technology they need to serve citizens well (and without working straight through their evenings and weekends). All of it is in service of the government we all deserve — one that works for everybody, even if they don’t have a forward-thinking church nurse, vaccine yenta, or tech-savvy grandkids.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“The Really Big One” by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker.
Does working in tech mean that I’m off to the west coast now? Absolutely not. Why? Because I read this article six years ago.
The next great American crisis could well be a terrible earthquake. We know it’s coming and we’ve done shockingly little to prepare. I read this article six years ago and have thought about it almost every day since.
“We Have PTSD About COVID Reality” by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark.
Here’s something else about great American crises, but this is a bit more optimistic.
“I’m nobody’s Pollyanna. And today my concern is that the public health establishment is not conveying an appropriate amount of optimism about what the post-vaccine future is going to look like.”