A Letter From Our CEO

To our community:

We have heard your concerns over the past week in light of media coverage regarding our approach to COVID-19 vaccine administration. We appreciate that you care deeply, as do we, about ensuring that only those who are eligible receive vaccines. We are not perfect and the work we are doing is challenging, but we remain committed to taking a hard look at our efforts and finding ways to continuously improve. To that end, we want to share our commitment to you, to our team, and to our communities to do better.

We are focused on better eligibility checking. We take eligibility requirements seriously and have tightened our COVID-19 vaccine eligibility confirmation processes to be above and beyond what has been previously asked of us by public health officials. We do not tolerate anyone within our organization intentionally facilitating vaccination of ineligible people.

We are making it more clear that access to COVID vaccine appointments is free. We will make this clear and conspicuous in our communications, and will continue to provide free access to the public for COVID vaccine appointments.

We will continue to make ourselves available to serve our communities. We believe deeply in helping advance COVID-19 vaccine access to vulnerable populations. For example, we are already working with New York City to vaccinate the city’s homeless.

We want to be part of the solution to vaccinating the public and hope improvement in our execution can do a better job of reflecting that. We also want to provide some transparency into those improvements. To this end, please also find a recent note I shared with our team earlier this week about our efforts to continuously improve:

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for all you continue to do to serve our communities during this pandemic. Additionally, thank you for your feedback and focus on continuous improvement to make sure we continue to vaccinate only those eligible in the community.

You may have seen some additional media coverage about our vaccination policies. As was reported, we received an email last night from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis requesting information on One Medical’s COVID-19 vaccine administration. We will share information requested by this subcommittee, as we share a goal of ending this pandemic through a fair and equitable national vaccine roll-out.

As we previously shared, we have added new standard work practices to better ensure eligibility criteria are met:

• In addition to the self-attestation already required within our booking process, we now require in-person COVID vaccine eligibility verification for all patients at all of our vaccination sites nationally, unless we have been asked to follow other specific processes defined by DPH partners in communities where we are vaccinating only their referrals.
• We have also added additional guardrails within our booking platform to further prevent ineligible people from booking appointments, and are scanning appointments in advance and actively cancelling anyone who doesn’t meet eligibility criteria.
• We are making these eligibility enforcement policies as clear as possible by linking to them on the homepage of our website.

We thank you for taking these additional steps on top of the work you continue to do vaccinating and providing other life-saving care every day. We know that this has been challenging work, and that those providing this care on the ground have valuable insights and learnings that can help us improve as an organization. We understand that some team members have voiced concerns that were not immediately escalated, and want to improve on more efficiently addressing such feedback. We continue to seek input and encourage you to share your suggestions and observations with leadership by emailing [redacted email address for internal use.]

We are proud of our efforts to vaccinate thousands of vulnerable, eligible people over the past couple months, including but not limited to the elderly, public educators and the unhoused. We will continue to stay dedicated and focused on lending our time, energy and resources to provide equitable and accessible care to the communities we serve. Moreover, as we do with everything in our organization, we are committed to continuous improvement.

Sincerely,

Amir