In rural Malawi, a digital register is helping medical professionals to access their patients’ health data from anywhere. The patients’ data are entered in the e-register app, a digital register that guides staff step-by-step through the process of taking a medical history and ensures that no intermediate step is overlooked. The digital solution has significantly improved medical care, not least because the interventions proposed in the app are in line with WHO standards.
The e-register has also led to a dramatic reduction in wasted vaccines. Since vaccinations are recorded in the e-register app when patients are admitted, this information can be consulted during treatment. This means that medical staff know whether patients need to receive a vaccination or have already been vaccinated, and the health centre can therefore order the right quantity of vaccine at the appropriate time. Until now, vaccine doses often had to be destroyed because their already limited shelf life was further cut short by lengthy transport routes and high temperatures.
Harvesting Digital Results
Health, Social Protection and Population Policy has been one of the core areas of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) since 2022. With an overall rating of 2.25 (on a scale of 1, ‘highly successful’, to 6, ‘highly unsuccessful’), the 12 projects in this core area scored slightly above average as compared with the overall rating of all CPEs from 2018 to 2022 (2.26).
Millions of people benefited from the measures that contribute to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being. Here are the results data from 2021 on this core area:
