CVS is now providing data via a SMART Scheduling Links API. This is a new data standard that will hopefully make it easier and more reliable for the pharmacies to share appointment data, so I'm excited to see pharmacy adoption of this. Thanks, CVS!
This switches the CVS implementation to be based on this new API feed from CVS. They've said the underlying data should refresh every 5 minutes. Some additional notes on this change:
API location ID changes: In the Vaccine Spotter API, these CVS locations will have entirely new IDs, since the representation of the locations has changed. So hopefully this won't be too disruptive, but it is a potential change for API consumers.
More specific store locations: Previously, we just had city names for CVS locations, which led to a decent amount of confusion on the map (since the locations on the map weren't really correct, just a rough approximation). This new data includes individual store locations, so hopefully all of this will make more sense now.
Appointment dates: While this data doesn't include specific appointment times, it does include dates of when appointments should be open, so hopefully that will help give a better sense of things if you're looking for appointments on specific dates.
No vaccine type: Unfortunately, this still doesn't include vaccine type information, but it's still more data than we previously had for CVS.
New booking link: I observed one point in time where the new data wasn't aligned with what https://www.cvs.com/immunizations/covid-19-vaccine was saying was bookable. It sounds like that may have been due to maintenance on CVS's end, or possibly a caching issue, but several other developers report better lucky linking directly to the next step in the booking page, so hopefully that will help in these situations.
Maybe doesn't include today's appointments? Based on some testing today, it seems like this data feed might not included appointments for the current day if there are any openings. But otherwise, it does seem to match what's available on CVS.com for future dates. The previous source of data (CVS's city-based landing page) also doesn't seem like it accounts for today's appointments, so I don't think this is any worse than what we had before. And with appointment availability increasing quite a bit, hopefully this will still help in booking future appointments.
CVS is now providing data via a SMART Scheduling Links API. This is a new data standard that will hopefully make it easier and more reliable for the pharmacies to share appointment data, so I'm excited to see pharmacy adoption of this. Thanks, CVS!
This switches the CVS implementation to be based on this new API feed from CVS. They've said the underlying data should refresh every 5 minutes. Some additional notes on this change: