• By Todd Luck
• Posted Friday, February 12, 2021

Forsyth County Public Health to open vaccination call center and post more appointments Saturday

The Forsyth County Department of Public Health will open its COVID-19 vaccination call center on Saturday at 8 a.m. for questions and appointments.

There will be a limited number of new appointments that will open both online and by phone at 8 a.m. Residents can schedule the appointments at Bit.Ly/FCNCCovidVaccine or by calling the new call center at 336-360-5260. New appointments are added on a weekly basis based on the amount of vaccine Forsyth County Public Health is allocated by the state. There are a limited number of appointments and they usually fill up very quickly. Vaccine supply is currently limited and residents are urged to be patient.

To avoid long hold times from the high volume of calls that’s expected, callers will hear a prerecorded message and their number will be put in an automatic queue, and they will receive a call back from Public health staff, who will make two attempts to contact callers. Some phone providers may display the call center number as private when staff returns calls. This is outside of the Health Department's control, so callers who are expecting a return call are urged to answer.

In order to avoid filling the queue up with duplicate numbers, residents should only call the number one time to receive a callback and should not call multiple times. Private numbers will not show up in the queue. The call center may close temporarily if the queue is full, and residents will need to call back if that happens.

Forsyth County Public Health has partnered with locally-owned bizdial, LLC for the new call center system. Neha Patel, founder and CEO of bizdial, said this is her way of helping the health department and residents battle the pandemic. She said other counties or providers looking for a Covid-19 vaccine scheduling solution, should feel free to contact bizdial.

“With a sense of community service, bizdial is happy to join in this inevitable fight against COVID-19 by giving our state of the art contact center solution and our expertise in providing excellent patient experience to our government for free as they make vaccination accessible for all members of our community,” said Patel. “We hope that our contribution serves to make vaccines easily accessible and provide relief to county staff and the rest of the community.”

All appointments are at the Winston-Salem Fairgrounds Annex Building located off Deacon Boulevard, where Forsyth County Public Health is administering more than 1,000 COVID-19 vaccinations a day. As of today, Forsyth County Public Health has administered 27,117 doses of the COVID-19 vaccination.