Blockchain technology for immunisation data storage in India: opportunities for population health innovation

Abstract

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. BACKGROUND Childhood vaccination is a costeffective public health intervention with proven positive outcomes on individual, community and global scales as some of the highest return of investment into healthcare. India’s vaccination programme is one of the largest in the world, covering 27 million live births per year and 100 million children under age 5 alone, but coverage is far from universal. Recent investments and improvements in India’s vaccine programme are working to improve the rates of immunised children, including the recent Mission Indradhanush. However, immunisation data in India is stored in complex fragmented data storage systems that have led to mismatch in resources and systemwide shortfalls. The fragmentation has been due to various innovations being developed in real time in a decentralised manner. With the global need for tracking immunisation data due to the COVID19 pandemic, solutions for improving immunisation data storage are critical. There is a great deal of interest surrounding use cases for blockchain technology in development and healthcare. Blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, can be especially useful in improving decentralised and error prone information storage. There has been limited use of blockchain technology in the field of healthcare data management despite the enthusiasm surrounding it, specifically no prior exploration of the use of blockchain technology in the national storage of healthcare data. In partnership with the Biotechnology and Research Council of India and Gates Grand Challenges India as part of the Immunisation Data: Innovating for Action programme, we explored means for improvement in digitisation of data through the use of blockchain technology.