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Digital technologies and vaccine deployment: Opportunities and challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted billions of lives worldwide leading to over 1.8 million deaths while unleashing serious economic hardship with outsized impacts on the poor and precariously employed. But the start of vaccination campaigns around the world now raises hopes for a global recovery.

However, vaccine delivery—including their distribution and administration—comes with challenges including manufacturing delays, the availability or reliability of ultra-cold supply chains, risks of delays in vaccine shipments crossing borders, prioritization of populations to receive vaccinations, complexity of scheduling vaccinations, ensuring the quality of vaccines, tracking recipients for follow-up, and ensuring that the majority of people are mobilized and vaccinated.

Given the anticipated scale and speed of the vaccine delivery process, digital technologies can play a critical role to support the planning, delivery, monitoring, and management of vaccination programs. Indeed, there are many tools being considered to support vaccine delivery efforts, globally. In some cases, countries are testing new registration or decision support systems including using open source platforms. Existing digital tools could also be rapidly deployed in support of the vaccination effort. Countries like India plan to repurpose digital platforms used in ongoing immunization programs to track the movement of stocks of COVID-19 vaccines.

The design and implementation of these digital tools will need to consider the infrastructure and regulatory environment in each country. These vary significantly across and within countries and interventions will typically need to be designed specifically for the context in which they are to function.

For example, the success of digital logistics applications that use mobile networks will depend on the coverage and quality of mobile network in a country. Similarly, digital vaccination recording and follow-up systems may benefit from using ID systems to determine eligibility and track patients between doses if those systems and digitized and offer reliable unique identification of the population. These systems should also be secured to prevent unauthorized access or tampering of data, and to protect the privacy of patients and staff. And the ability of governments to use personal data to prioritize and track vaccination programs will also depend on the legal and regulatory framework around personal data use, as well as the data governance and exchange platforms to share and match data.