Mobile-based Vaccine Registry to Improve Collection and Completeness of Maternal Immunization Data

Abstract

Immunization during pregnancy and infancy significantly reduces morbidity and mortality of mothers, unborn fetuses, and young infants. Several studies show the merits of getting complete, quality, and accurate data on time to enhance policy and decision-making for society or country development. Despite the efforts by nations to ensure the success of maternal immunization through electronic immunization registries, limited resources such as poor internet access, shortage of electricity, and digital illiteracy in developing countries hinder the goal of full immunization of mothers and infants. Since 2015, immunization programs in Tanzania use internet-based information systems to collect immunization data from health facilities and submit them to the responsible authority for further decision-making such as the allocation of vaccines to health facilities. The internet-based media is not fully achieved in developing countries due to its cost and resource setting, thus, the responsible authority does not receive instant data to update its vaccine inventory and management activities which often results in partial immunization due to the unavailability of vaccines in some facilities. This challenge can be solved by having an affordable system that instantly incorporates and transmits vaccination details such as the utilization of vaccines and demands from each health facility to responsible authority with less resources. The present study proposes a USSD platform to enhance the receipt of real-time data by immunization authorities from both health facilities with poor and good internet connectivity at a lesser cost. A greater number of health facilities in Tanzania prefer to use both online and offline platforms for collecting and recording immunization data. As electronic immunization registry has been introduced in areas with limited resources, it is recommended the use online and offline platforms for data collection so that they can submit immunization data in real-time without the delays caused by poor resource setting.