ETHIOPIA – Mastercard, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, global public health consulting organization John Snow, Inc. (JSI) and the Ethiopia Ministry of Health have partnered to implement the Mastercard Wellness Pass solution within Ethiopia’s health information system.
Under the deal, the Wellness Pass will allow a patient’s medical data to be stored offline and travel with them on their Mastercard Community Pass chip card after the patient gets their first vaccine or care from participating health facilities.
Ethiopia’s Wellness Pass will help address myriad of challenges when using the manual healthcare system such as siloed medical records, limited patient verification, lack of accessibility and offline portability which lead to an inability to aggregate and report data efficiently.
Gavi and Mastercard have been partnered since 2018, to deploy the Mastercard Wellness Pass to eligible countries, with the aim to not only deliver vaccines to millions of individuals but also, using Mastercard’s technology, enable the digitization of health records in the form of contactless cards
Mastercard, Gavi, the Ethiopia Ministry of Health and JSI have collaborated to implement the Wellness Pass technology through several phases aimed at ensuring people have access to critical health care delivered in an efficient and effective manner through private-sector capabilities.
Phase one of the implementation will focus on COVID-19 vaccination tracking and will be deployed at health facilities across Ethiopia over a 15-month period while Phase two involves the scaling up of the use of Wellness Pass across multiple health care programs in partnership with the Ministry of Health.
The Mastercard Wellness Pass solution comes at a time when lack of healthcare data portability has a definite impact on the levels of service utilization and health outcomes among people in different geographical areas and socio-economic groups.
The digital technology will support Ethiopia’s national health response program by enabling the continuity of patient care through the portability of digitized health records since the form of contactless cards for patients can be used by health facilities in connected and offline environments.
The portable health credentials will improve healthcare by decentralizing patient record keeping and facilitating better recording, tracking, and patient adherence to vaccination cycles to benefit patients, healthcare service providers and the Ministry of Health.
Subsequently, the Wellness Pass will bring efficiency to healthcare tracking and offline portability of health records in the most marginalized communities across Ethiopia while making it easy for doctors and clinicians to access or retrieve patient healthcare data.
The electronic health records initiative is aligned with Ethiopia’s Information Revolution Agenda that seeks to boost availability, accessibility, affordability and quality of primary health care to ultimately improve the health and wellbeing of the Ethiopian population.
In addition, Wellness Pass will create continuity of care with clinicians by ensuring that vaccination records are available at any time through participating health facilities and it will utilize tokenized biometrics to verify service delivery and adhere to vaccination cycles.
The digitization of vaccination records through the Mastercard Wellness Pass will further contribute to Gavi’s efforts to continue to care for patients with vital health services such as immunization to ensure everyone receives the essential vaccines they need to survive and thrive.
Moreover, the Mastercard Wellness Pass is an offline portable healthcare credential that will allow for more accurate measurement of target populations for COVAX-related data-driven planning, improved adherence to health care protocols and continuity of care to patients through record portability.
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