H. Vinod Bhat, Vice-Chancellor of Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), launched “HealthGate Passport”, a vaccination record-keeping platform, here on Friday.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Bhat said that many parents from migrant communities (55 %-75 %) lost their child’s vaccination card and were unaware of the complete 20 vaccinations schedule. Thus, only 25 % of migrant children got complete vaccination hindering the country’s progress to reduce child mortality from vaccination preventable deaths.
To solve this problem, the Innovation Centre at MAHE, the Community Medicine Department, Kasturba Medical College (KMC) and the Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) had developed a novel digital and visual platform to record vaccination. This included a mobile app for smart phones, where healthcare workers entered vaccination data.
The data is backed up on a secure Cloud server and also stored on a NFC smart card and provided to mothers along with a “HealthGate Passport” documenting vaccination dates. This entire package costs less than ₹ 200 per child, while it recorded the child’s entire vaccination history.
“During our feasibility study, we found this vaccination records technology has been enthusiastically accepted by our frontline health workers and mothers in five of our clinics, and the Dr. T.M.A. Pai Rotary Hospital in Karkala,” he said.
“The technology is easy to use as it saves our health workers at lot of time,” Suma Nair, Head, Department of Community Medicine, KMC, said. “Data entry on the smart phone is accurate and I can get quick reports on the number of vaccination that we have provided at the different clinics,” Chythra Rao, faculty, Department of Community Medicine, said.
“Using this technology, our migrant populations will be benefited as they can go to any clinic and their child’s vaccination records will be easily available to the doctors there,” according to Arun Shanbhag, Chief Innovation Officer, MAHE and Principal Investigator of the project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Explorer Awards.
“Such collaborations with medical and engineering colleges are essential to develop innovative ideas and solve difficult problems in the healthcare sector,” he said.
