Vaccination Drive Requires Accurate Data

Kompas/Priyombodo

Health workers inject the Covid-19 vaccine produced by Sinovac Biotech, China into medical personnel at the Pondok Betung Health Center, Pondok Aren, South Tangerang, Banten, Saturday (23/1/2021).

The vaccination program to control the Covid-19 pandemic requires the support of reliable population data to achieve its goals.

Last week, this daily reported that the vaccination program for health workers had run into problems with the registration of vaccine recipients. Health workers, especially doctors and nurses, whose daily tasks expose them to a higher risk of contracting Covid-19, are given priority in the first phase of the vaccination program.

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The government invited the health workers via short messages simultaneously, asking them to register online via a particular link. In practice, many health workers found it difficult to register or were rejected on the grounds that their data or population identification number did not match or was unknown. By Saturday (23/1/2021), 10 days after the health worker vaccination program began, only 172,901 health workers had registered. The government\'s target is for 1.4 million health workers to be vaccinated by the end of February (Kompas, 24/1/2021). The experience above shows how important it is to have unified data on the population and to periodically update a variety of data related to development.

The data includes all information about the population, economy, social and political affairs. For health purposes, of course, health data must also be available, such as on the vaccination someone has received, insurance and comorbidity factors that could complicate medical action.

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Collecting and updating data is costly. Therefore, master data is managed by the government centrally, while state institutions and ministries can manage the master data in accordance with their main duties and functions.

KOMPAS/ADITYA DIVERANTA

A health worker measures a medical staff\'s blood pressure before undergoing vaccination at the Puskesmas Palmerah II Village, West Jakarta, DKI Jakarta, 15 January 2021.

Apart from the master data, the agencies and ministries need to develop more detailed data. The Health Ministry, for example, collects health data through public and private health services, ranging from the integrated service posts (Posyandu) and community health centers (Puskesmas) to hospitals. The specific data will be very useful for special purposes, such as Covid-19 vaccination.

Some of this data is in the population administration, although it needs updating. The 2020 census, results of which were announced on 21 January 2021, aims to achieve unified population data. We hope that there will be data harmonization soon, given the government\'s aim to provide Covid-19 vaccinations to around 181 million people by the end of 2021.

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To record data on the potential vaccine recipients properly, we need reliable information technology, without interruption. The use of information technology will simplify the process of registering participants and administering vaccines. The current solution in the form of manual registration is hopefully just temporary and to be replaced by a digital system.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has repeatedly asked all government officials from the central level to the regions to work on one national database. We hope that this database can be realized soon. Even so, the public must be guaranteed that the data they provide will be safe and not misused by anyone.

This article was translated by Kurniawan H. Siswoko.