To ensure equitable access to vaccines, The Government of Jamaica has chosen to use digital technologies in vaccine scheduling, data collection, certification and health resource management.
Late 2019, While the number of people infected with COVID-19 in China is rising, Infections had already begun to appear in different parts of the world and then took an accelerated curve that did not spare any country.
Of course, The effects of the pandemic in some countries have been more severe than others, In Jamaica, which generally has better health indicators than its counterparts in Latin America and the Caribbean, The pandemic has had profound effects on health, economy and well-being. After recording the first case of infection in the country of just 3 million, The number of infections soon approached 150,000 with several thousand deaths. No sooner had the curve flattened than it rose significantly again in early 2021.
Although most of the active health facilities are governmental and affiliated with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, The Government receives cash and technical assistance from relevant international organizations.
A year after the pandemic crossed the Jamaican border, The government has started receiving vaccine doses provided by the global COVAX initiative aimed at achieving equitable access to vaccination, Jamaica delivered nearly 1.5 million doses, This is barely enough to vaccinate a quarter of the population, given that each person needs two doses. Hence, The government has faced difficulties in distributing vaccines, identifying eligible citizens and regulating their access. The challenges did not end here, Vaccinated individuals must be granted non-falsifiable certifications to enable them to re-engage in public life and social, economic and other activities.
In the face of a tight time frame and reduced resources, The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare has resorted to collaborative digital and methodological tools, She partnered with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Private Sector Vaccine Initiative to develop two digital solutions to help manage vaccinations.
In the first stage, Partners hired a leading digital health company to create a secure, open-source digital platform called Comcare to deliver the national vaccination campaign. And before that, The team has developed a model to prepare 150 trainers and provide them with the knowledge and skills to train more than a thousand health care workers, including doctors, nurses, administrative staff, technicians and medical equipment maintenance officers.
The platform provides direct access to key data and information, such as the number of doses received by citizens, and the complications they had, and demographic and geographical calculations. The process is divided into 3 stages, They are examination, vaccination and follow-up, Health teams use smartphone applications linked to the platform to identify citizens who need to receive the vaccine. They are instructed to go to vaccination centres. Analysis software monitors vaccinations, records missed appointments, and prioritizes vaccination of high-risk groups and sectors.
The second phase of the response, It bore the name of the digital infrastructure of open vaccination certificates, It was developed by the partners in cooperation with the eGovernment Corporation, selected to be a member of the Digital Government Products Consortium, In addition to having functional and administrative structures that enable it to adapt quickly to the reality of each country, It was initially developed in India, More than a billion certificates have been issued there, It was then used in other Asian countries such as the Philippines.
The two platforms are permanently linked to exchange data, They adopt a software interface for the automatic generation of certificates within the framework established by the World Health Organization, It is called “Digital Authentication of COVID-19 Vaccine Certificates”.
Trilateral cooperation played a crucial role in the success of this project, The mentality of the private sector combined with the expertise and funding of the international organization as well as the administrative and leadership capacities of the official government.
The platform should have contained all the data of the national vaccination campaign to achieve the ideal scenario that adopts a single system, But pollination began weeks before the launch of the platform. Hence, The work was done through two parallel systems, Paper and digital. To overcome this challenge, The partners hired special teams to digitize about 160,000 records in a two-week process.
Moreover, The platform does not allow scheduling of vaccine doses, This is what UNICEF is currently trying to overcome through a team of logistics, information technology and public health experts working on the development of the scheduling system and program development. Especially since the government must prepare accurate daily reports on cases on its territory, The project also adopted a cascade training approach that identifies distinguished employees and uses them to motivate their colleagues to get used to the digital system. Taking into account differences in age, experience and technical knowledge.
Technology has brought immediate benefits to Jamaica and established a secure process to improve workflow, increase reporting efficiency, save time, effort and cost, The Ministry of Health has given the knowledge ground to make informed decisions and plan the response to emergency and non-emergency conditions according to the scene on the ground.
And because this partnership has proven that the digitization and modernization of the health system is a possible goal after the platform achieved the standards of equity and inclusiveness in a relatively short time, It could be a sign of a change in the shape of the entire system.
References:
