How Timor-Leste is employing digital innovation during the pandemic to get a handle on it
When the youngest country of Asia set on the COVID-19 vaccination, it had a few choices to make and challenges to circumvent. Besides the disease itself, the pandemic has put a spanner in every aspect of the best of health systems. In the long term, the vaccination target group is the entire adult population, and the records must be separated by weeks between the two doses for each person. In addition, manual entry of data posed many challenges beginning from real-time data collection of inoculation to centralizing data from 13 municipals divisions with about 72 community health centres (CHCs) that collate data from hundreds of COVID-19 vaccination pots.
The solution had to be economically viable, efficient, and simple enough to be made universally operational within the country's health system. But challenges like this bring out the best of innovations. In Timor-Leste's case, the Ministry of Health, with technical support from WHO, launched the COVID-19 Immunization Tracker (CIT).
With all -round technical support from WHO; the COVID-19 Immunization Tracker or CIT was designed and integrated into the existing Timor-Leste Health Information System or TLHIS.
TLHIS-CIT is a District Health Information System-2 (DHIS) based system that will capture both individuals and aggregated data of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. The CIT can also be used as a monitoring and evaluation tool to assess the vaccine deployment's progress and efficacy.
Every day at 10 AM, a detailed report of previous day’s vaccination and cumulative performance of COVID-19 Vaccine coverage is reviewed by Minister of Health and Director General of Health Services and key officials of the government to review the campaign’s progress decide on the future course.
"The design and integration of the CIT into the existing TLHIS system is an efficient idea; the centrality of the data is maintained without the need to create a separate and new design and platform," said Minister of Health, H.E dr. Odete Maria Freitas Belo.
The CIT has pre-registered data of the target population, and when a person receives the COVID-19 vaccination, it will record the time validation enabling real-time data updation and tracking. The CIT is also designed to record any adverse events following immunization (AEFI).
"Timor-Leste is among the first and few countries in the world to have taken this approach of the integration of COVID-19 immunization data in the existing health information system. In an increasingly digitized health system in use globally, it is crucial that Timor-Leste keeps up and find efficient ways of handling and recording critical data such as COVID-19 vaccination," said Dr Arvind Mathur, WHO Representative to Timor-Leste.
The CIT was launched by H.E President of the National Parliament, Sr Aniceto Guterres Lopes, in the presence of H.E Prime Minister Sr Taur Matan Ruak on 7 April 2021, on the day the country launched the COVID-19 vaccination drive, which coincides with the World Health Day.