Howdy! 

In the middle of this Covid wave 2 that has gripped many countries and now our country India, today we are going to focus on the vaccination programs across the globe, that are helping in curbing the pandemic. The intent of this article is to identify what countries have been successfully implementing and how a holistic approach focused around rolling vaccination programs and implementing them on the ground with the support of digital health strategies are helping countries in curbing the curve.

Programs and Systems used in United States:

In US, CDC (Centre of Disease Control and Prevention) has created multiple channels to ensure all Americans have access to Covid 19 vaccine. Since Jurisdictional delivery and administration vary, we have seen efforts have been made to report data around vaccines distribution, delivered and vaccines administered. If we look at some of the systems there are series of systems that US has implemented to ensure successful vaccine allocation, distribution, administration, monitoring, and reporting.

From Logistics standpoint:

• Vaccine Tracking System
• Immunization Information System
• Vaccine finder through portals like vaccines.gov
• Immunization (IZ) Gateway which is a cloud-based message routing service intended to enable data exchange between IISs, other provider systems, and the IZ Data Lake

From Vaccine Administration standpoint:

Vaccine Administration Management System ( VAMS ): This system is an easy-to-use, secure, online tool to manage vaccine administration from the time the vaccine arrives at a clinic until it is administered to a recipient.  

From Vaccination Data Collection and Reporting Standpoint:

Immunization Data Clearinghouse: Cloud-hosted data repository that receives, deduplicates, and deidentifies COVID-19 vaccination data that are then used to populate the IZ Data Lake with deidentified data for analytics.

Immunization Data lake (IZ Data Lake): cloud-hosted data repository to receive, store, manage, and analyze deidentified COVID-19 vaccination data, which also interfaces with other repositories from reporting standpoint like

• Data Storefront
• HHS protect Data hub
• Tiberius, a COVID-19 vaccine distribution planning, tracking, modeling, and analysis application

Privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL): With PPRL, jurisdictions and other reporting entities, leverages a unique identifier instead of PIIs (Personally Identifiable Information) to share vaccine administration information to CDC.

How UK is dealing with the program:

In England, COVID-19 vaccines have been delivered from 206 hospital hubs, 1,200 local vaccination service sites — run by a mixture of primary care networks and community pharmacies — and 50 vac­cination centers located in large-scale venues, such as football stadiums.

Patients are first contacted through a national call and recall program. Once they are notified by the service, they are able to book appointments. To book an appointment, patient can either leverage PCN-led vaccination center affiliated with their registered GP or can book through the National booking service that are vaccinated by community pharmacy or mass vaccination clinic. Pharmacists in the backend are made responsible for updating the clinic times.

Similar to US, Welsh government in UK has developed the Welsh Immunization System, which creates appointment and automatically schedules second doses and sends the appointment info.

How is India rolling this out?

In India, vaccination program started on 16th January 2021 through cowin portal. As per the reports from cowin portal, there are 52442 sites are conducting vaccination.

The total vaccination doses administered as on 4th May 2021 is around 15,70,38,553. Cowin is a Vaccine delivery management system being developed in partnership with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has been created to track the distribution of Covid 19 vaccines, monitor beneficiaries and for registration.

Below shown is the way India has leveraged the digital platform and has handled the vaccination program:

“These are those activities which were being digitally monitored within the country under the universal immunization programme: Secretary, @MoHFW_INDIA ”