See CommCare in Action
Watch as our team takes you through the design of a basic
app in CommCare
One of the main challenges of immunization worldwide is that timely coverage often drops off after the first few rounds. And if patients miss a booster—or are even just delayed—the immunizations are no longer effective.
To ensure the success of immunization campaigns and help countries improve coverage of under-immunised and zero-dose children, it is critical to verify delivery to target populations and accurately track patients’ immunization schedule.
CommCare is a highly adaptable open-source mobile health platform that can be customized to meet a variety of vaccine administration and management needs. It has been successfully used to register, identify, and follow both clients and vaccine stock in a variety of countries and for a range of diseases.
Dimagi is a proud member of GAVI Innovation for Uptake, Scale and Equity in immunization (INFUSE) community, allowing us to contribute to saving lives and protecting people’s health by increasing equitable and sustainable use of vaccines.
Clinic-based registry systems employ longitudinal data tracking for individuals receiving vaccines.
Turnkey integrations with data analysis and visualization software ensure key stakeholders can monitor and compare mass vaccination campaigns and course completions.
Scheduling and workflow management features help to expand vaccine coverage to every patient.
Bi-directional messaging features allow patients to receive notifications for their next appointment or report adverse events in the interim.
Remote registration and eligibility determinations support vaccine delivery to patients living at the last mile.
Biometrics verification ensures delivery of the vaccines to the appropriate recipients.
Behavior change messaging can help to reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase uptake for uninformed populations.
Data integrations allow collaboration with and export to electronic health systems.
A custom CommCare application was integrated with VaxTrac, a biometric system, to create a digital immunization registry.
Lwala’s mobile app leads their community health workers through the proper workflows for vaccinations and maps regions where coverage was lowest.
Dimagi is supporting the development of a digital platform to support the dissemination of payment information to health workers.
VaxTrac, is a clinic-based vaccination registry system which health workers can use in the field to enroll children and track their immunization records. It eliminates the need for paper-based cohort books, tally sheets, and monthly reporting forms and improves health workers accuracy and efficiency.
We have been able to help build an integration between their MOTECH server (receiving data from CommCare server) and the government's DHIS2 server. This has been a very good use case to show how government systems can be strengthened through the use of a clinic-based registry, making available a very useful dashboard to support strategic decisions on vaccination programs at government level.
In terms of impact, 99 health centers were covered, 160 health workers trained, 100,000 children registered, 1,000,000 vaccines doses administered and time needed for the MoH to see data was reduced from 3 months to 7 days.
Lwala Community Alliance in Kenya fights high rates of maternal mortality and HIV. Using a community-led health model and a custom CommCare-based mobile application, CHWs register each pregnant woman or child under five years old into the formal healthcare system. The application then walks the CHW through the proper workflows for vaccinations, family planning, disease diagnosis and treatment, or a number of other requested services.
CommCare allowed the implementing partner to do tiered targeting where they identified regions where coverage was lowest and held outreach events. CHWs would bring clients to a community venue, such as a school or church, and offered them the appropriate vaccines. For the remaining hold-outs, they targeted individual households to provide immunizations.
So far, the program has reached vaccination rates of over 96% across a population of 60,000 people. Prior to 2016 the coverage rate in the communities was in the low 60%, even though immunizations were available through hospitals.
Since July 2020, Dimagi has been working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Eradication Initiative (GPEI), and WHO to develop a CommCare based health workforce management system and support its roll out in multiple African countries for the 2020 polio vaccination campaign. The project will start in Cote D’Ivoire, before scaling to cover other countries.
The novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) is a vaccine against circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) that is authorized and available for use in eight initial target countries: Côte D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Mali, and South Sudan.
A key challenge with running vaccination campaigns is that campaign workers are often uncertain about how much payment they are entitled to, the status of those payments, and how to access them. These administrative and logistical challenges have ripple effects that can ultimately impact the timeliness, rigor, and quality of implementation of the broader campaign.
The program’s goal is to stop polio outbreaks through conducting fast and good quality polio vaccination campaigns. The role of the technology will be to help streamline and accelerate some of the processes such as recruitment of workers and payments. By bringing transparency, clarity, and efficiency to the campaign with CommCare, the program hopes to increase vaccinators' clarity and engagement, thereby increasing the number of children vaccinated.
Watch as our team takes you through the design of a basic
app in CommCare
Updates and advice from our world-class partners and Global Services team
Dimagi shares our vision for how our digital vaccine delivery platform can play a critical role in ensuring the COVID-19 vaccine is delivered at the last mile in LMICs equitably and efficiently.
Learn how a partner in Nepal used CommCare combined with biometrics technology to verify services were delivered to the intended recipients. Last mile client-level tracking of this kind can help verify vaccine recipients and accurately report vaccine coverage indicators.
As viable COVID-19 vaccines become available, the tools we use to ensure the equitable delivery of those vaccines will determine whether we can overcome the challenges that accompany them.
Learn how the world’s most powerful mobile data collection platform can help your program
“Through the Lwala Mobile app, CHWs have maintained a 95%
immunization rate. The app also eases the CHWs’ workload
via the Task Module to simply track referrals and follow-ups
for their priority clients.”
- John Oyugi, CHW Supervisor, Lwala Community Alliance
“Digital tools that monitor individual-level immunization
data for children under 5 years of age can enable health
programs to better target their reminders and for the
Ministry of Health to better allocate human and financial resources.”
- Luc Noundia Kabore, Health Program Manager, Terre des hommes