The Ministry of Health is expected to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in order to access software designed to keep track of COVID-19 vaccination data as well as implement a new vaccination card system.
This was disclosed by the Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony yesterday during his daily COVID-19 update, where he stated that the Ministry is currently working simultaneously on a number of projects where the end result would be to enable vaccine registers to be converted to a digital format.
“… All the manual registers that we have we are converting that into digital format, so that work has been ongoing,” Anthony informed while adding that staff have been recruited for that purpose while a special area has been designated to have that work done and as such the conversion process is currently ongoing.
The minister explained that they are working with the Government of India to ensure access to a software called COWIN which will enable health authorities to keep track of vaccination information. In July, Dr Anthony had stated that the government had signalled its interest in acquiring the software which was developed in India. At that time he indicated that the authorities had very comprehensive information as it related to the inoculation records but it was not in a user-friendly manner.
He added that the ministry is expected to sign on to a MoU which would allow the health authorities here to acquire the COWIN software. “Once we get the COWIN software that’s going to be what we will be using so we migrate the electronic data that we have into that software and then we will be able to produce the new cards that people would have.”
Anthony pointed out that these new cards will have features that would make it difficult for persons to forge. This is view of the fact that recently there have been a number of cases of persons attempting to forge the current vaccination cards.
