Co-WIN for planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination

New Delhi (India Science Wire): As COVID-19’s largest vaccination drive begins, the vaccination monitoring and evaluation is going to be a huge task. To ensure smooth running of the vaccination programme, a dedicated web portal called Co-WIN (COVID -19 Vaccine Intelligence Network) has been launched recently. Co-WIN serves 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.

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 the 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 the vaccination process. It as of now has no self-registration option. 

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 utilization, wastage, coverage of COVID-19 vaccination at the National, State, District and Sub-District level. The Co-WIN system has components like 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, self-registration by the general population, 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.

The Co-WIN app would provide help in the registration of individual beneficiaries by facility/planning unit level users. It would also help for authentication/verification of beneficiaries and recording the successful vaccination at time of conducting the session. The Co-WIN app is not yet available on Google play store or for Apple users, it would be available soon.

The Union Minister of Science and Technology, Minister of Health and Family Welfare and Minister of Earth Sciences Dr Harsh Vardhan posted on twitter that CoWIN app’s self-registration module will be released soon and it is mandatory to register with the app for the vaccination process. He also added, The QR code-based vaccination certificate will only be generated for Covid-19 vaccine beneficiaries who are registered on the CoWIN platform. (India Science Wire)