News Brief
Vaccinating India Against Covid: Modi Govt To Launch CoWIN App With Comprehensive Features, Here's How It Will Work
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan
With the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) approving the emergency use of two Covid-19 vaccines, Bharat Biotech's Covaxin and Serum Institute of India's (SII) Covishield, the Health Ministry has begun the preparation for roll out of mass Covid-19 vaccination drive across the country.
For the effective roll out of the vaccination drive, the government is set to launch a mobile application called COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN).
The platform will not only help the government to coordinate the massive inoculation process but it will also help health authorities in monitoring the coronavirus vaccines in real-time.
CoWIN has been developed as an extension of the existing electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN) module for it to be a comprehensive cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination in India.
According to the Health Ministry, the Co-WIN system is an end to end solution that has utilities for the entire public health system from national up to the vaccinator level.
The system allows for creation of users (admins, supervisors, vaccinators), registration of beneficiaries (bulk upload and individual registration), facilities/planning unit and session sites followed by planning and scheduling sessions and implementation of vaccination process, the ministry said.
Co-WIN system on a real time basis will track not only the beneficiaries but also the vaccines, at national, state and district level. This will allow the system to monitor the utilisation, wastage, coverage of COVID-19 vaccination at National, State, District and Sub-District level.
The Co-WIN system has the following components:
1. The website www.cowin.gov.in will be used by the National, State and District Level administrators. The key features of the website are:
Creation of State and District level admins;
Creation of facility/planning unit databases;
Creation of vaccinator, and supervisor databases;
Manage material relevant to COVID-19 Vaccination and its allocation;
Creation of session sites;
Bulk upload of beneficiary data for registration;
Session management for linking session sites, vaccinators, supervisors, and beneficiaries;
Rights for viewing sessions and beneficiary allocated to these sessions for Block Admin and Facility Medical Officer In charge; and
Monitoring and Reporting.
2. The application www.app.cowin.gov.in will be for the following:
Registration of individual beneficiaries by facility/planning unit level users; and
For authentication/verification of beneficiaries and recording the successful vaccination at time of conducting the session.
Besides, the CoWIN application will allow automated session allocation, will have Aadhaar authentication to prevent malpractice, allow willing beneficiaries to create unique health ID. It will also help in reporting and tracking of adverse events, if any, following immunisation.
The SMS service of the system will be offered in 12 languages to guide beneficiaries as well as vaccinators.
QR-code based vaccination certificate will be issued to the beneficiaries after all doses.
The Digilocker app has been integrated with the CoWIN app for data retrieval and storing QR-code based certificate.
The CoWIN system will also comprise of 24x7 helpline including IT professionals for the beneficiaries. Further, a chatbot will pattern recognition system will help the users to navigate the portal.
It will also have Natural Language Processing in vaccinator module for hands free implementation.
In a press briefing on Tuesday (5 January), Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan informed that multiple dry runs have been conducted for the field testing of the software at the various stages of development.
Over 90,000 users have been trained in more than 700 districts for operating the platform, he added.
