DIPC

Project overview

Countries face significant challenges when building digital immunization solutions, especially during pandemics. Fragmentation inhibits secure and interoperable data exchange across systems. A lack of resources impedes local stakeholders from sustaining these systems and easily adapting to changing healthcare needs—as was the case for many countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the Digital Innovation in Pandemic Control (DIPC) project, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and PATH's Digital Square initiative are addressing these existing challenges by partnering with ministries of health (MOH) in Ghana, Malawi, and Tanzania to select and adapt robust digital tools to strengthen immunization systems. The project launched in November 2022 and will run through November 2024. All digital tools selected will be nationally scalable and interoperable.

Mapping digital ecosystems for immunization

The overall goal of the DIPC project is to create models for more agile, efficient, sustainable, and pandemic-prepared health systems with a focus on immunization workflows across the three partner countries. To do this, the project teams first partnered with each country’s ministry of health to conduct landscaping analyses to better understand the landscape of tools currently used in each country’s immunization health domain and outline priorities to inform their journeys to develop and operationalize interoperable digital systems that support immunization from end to end. These landscaping exercises resulted in the development of profiles for each of the three countries.

Country priorities

Based on the results of the country profile, each project country has identified a unique focus area that fits within its respective digital health ecosystem.

Ghana

The Ghana team is extending the child health module of the existing E-Tracker system (based on the global good DHIS2) to support child immunization. The team is also supporting the interoperability of current digital immunization tools by developing requirements for an interoperability layer (IOL) using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards to enable evaluation and selection of an IOL that best meets Ghana’s needs. Learn more.

Malawi

The Malawi team is developing an adult vaccination module for the Malawi Healthcare Information System (MaHIS), a digital system based on the data schema for global good OpenMRS. Learn more.

Tanzania

The Tanzania team is upgrading the current Tanzania Electronic Immunization Registry (TImR) to be locally owned and managed as well as providing implementation support to country stakeholders.

Workstreams

The DIPC project activities will be carried out under three primary workstreams:

1. Accelerate implementation of digital tools to support immunization

2. Develop immunization product suites aligned with WHO’s Digital Adaptation Kit for Immunization

3. Strengthen capacity of countries to support immunization digitally

These workstreams are designed to work together to achieve the project goal throughout the life cycle of the project, as depicted in Figure 1.

Digital Square’s role

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Digital Square has leveraged its unique role and strengths to support countries, donors, and partners to use digital tools in prevention and response efforts. Harnessing our technical expertise and established relationships across the global digital health ecosystem—including our engagement with and support of digital global goods for health—Digital Square supports countries to select and adapt digital tools to help prepare for any future pandemics by strengthening digital systems for immunization.

Learn more about our other work in pandemic preparedness.