Daily Times

KARACHI: A digital immunisation registry was launched in Karachi on Tuesday.

The registry is aimed at reducing child mortality from vaccine preventable diseases through increased routine immunisation enrolment and timeliness of vaccinations.

The registry will enable mobile-based data entry of routinely collected Expanded Programme for Immunisation (EPI) data that include child’s name, bio-data and immunisation history, linked in real time to a web-based monitoring dashboard.

The EPI of the Sindh Health Department launched Zindagi Mehfooz (ZM) Digital Immunisation Registry, an android-based application developed by Interactive Research and Development (IRD) with Indus Health Network (IHN).

The provincial scale-up is funded by the World Health Organisation-Pakistan with the support of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). The registry was initially funded by UN Foundation Innovation Working Group and was later supported by the WHO for limited pilots and scale-up.

At the time of a child’s visit to the EPI centre, the vaccinator will enroll the child in the registry by assigning him/her a unique ID in the form of a Quick Response (QR) code and submitting the data to the web dashboard in real time.

The registry will also enable automated SMS reminders for parents to remind them of their child’s upcoming vaccination, a decision support system for routine and catch-up immunisations and a real time tracking and monitoring system for vaccinators.

Speaking on the occasion, speakers said out of every 1,000 live births, 82 children die before their first birthday in Sindh according to Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2014. Most of these deaths are due to vaccine preventable diseases. In children aged 12-23 months in Sindh, only 35% of children receive EPI recommended vaccines during the first year of life.

Dr Subhash Chandir, IRD’s director of Child Health and Vaccines Programme, said about three out of four children were under vaccinated in Sindh.

“The registry will change the landscape of child health by engaging parents for timely immunisation, systemising vaccinator’s jobs by creating centralised immunisation records, reducing time spent on paper-based reporting and creating more time and opportunities for vaccinators to immunise children,” Dr Chandir added.

Indus Health Network Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr Abdul Bari Khan said that some contributing factors to suboptimal immunisation coverage were overburdened immunisation staff, inadequate health infrastructure, lack of awareness and wrong perceptions regarding immunisation among parents, and paper-based systems that make it difficult to track and monitor a child’s immunisation coverage.

The registry was piloted in Karachi in 2012 and Shikarpur district in 2015 before being scaled up to the entire province. Once expanded throughout Sindh, the registry would be used by more than 3,000 government vaccinators using smartphones across 1,600 basic health units in the province.

Published in Daily Times, October 4^th 2017.