NEW DELHI: The government will soon launch clones of the CoWIN platform, credited with the successful Covid-19 vaccination programme, and replicate it for its equally massive universal immunisation programme and blood bank registry.
In an interview, National Health Authority (NHA) Chief Executive Officer R.S. Sharma told this newspaper that they are planning a similar system to Cowin, a cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating Covid-19 vaccination in India, which will perform in the same way for the government's vaccination campaigns under the universal immunisation and blood bank registry.
"Work has already started. It will take a couple of months for us to create it. We will be launching it by this year," he said.
Sharma, who created the indigenous CoWIN app and was lauded for playing an important role in the Covid vaccination journey, said they are repurposing CoWIN.
He said, "We won't touch CoWIN, but we will make a clone on the same principles. We will be creating two other platforms, just like CoWIN. We will create one platform for the blood bank system and another for the universal immunisation programme."
The government provides free of cost vaccines against 12 vaccine-preventable diseases under the universal immunisation programme, one of the largest public health programmes targeting close to 2.67 crore newborns and 2.9 crore pregnant women annually.
Sharma said the mobile app would provide real-time information about every vaccination and be user-friendly.
Giving an example, he said that in the case of blood donation, the app would provide information on registration, blood bank donation camps, and even hospitals can share information.
He said people could also download certificates and blood donation history.
The NHA head said that in the same way, the app can be useful for the polio campaign. It can send reminders to parents on their child's polio drop due date, also each child will have an account and their polio history will be tracked.
"Apart from that, there will be information about other vaccines also. People will be able to get information easily, just the way it happened for Covid vaccination," he added.