THE Covid-19 vaccination certificate in the MySejahtera app will be used as a digital health passport in the future, said the app’s founder, Dr A. Maheshwara Rao.

The Ministry of Health disease control division senior principal assistant director told The Malaysian Insight that the digital certificate, issued to all the app’s users who have completed vaccination, is designed according to the standards of global health and travel authorities.

“The Covid-19 vaccination certificate is currently being given to all MySejahtera users who have been vaccinated.

“In the near future, this will serve as a digital health passport for both local and international travel,” said Maheshwara.

“The digital certificate for vaccination was designed by taking into account the standards set by the World Health Organization and International Air Transport Association.”

The Ministry of Health also has plans to expand MySejahtera into a national digital healthcare app to deal with other diseases besides Covid-19, he said.

It will also be integrated with a clinical management system in the future.

The app, which has more than 24 million downloads currently, was the brainchild of Maheshwara, who was supported by Dr Norhayati Rusli, the director of the ministry’s disease control division.

It was developed to help the ministry find ways to inform the public of the latest development related to the spread of Covid-19, Maheshwara said.

“There was also a need for the ministry to be able to perform contact tracing,” he said.

“This demand could be met via a mobile application that would allow members of the community to perform self-assessment and keep them up to date with the latest information on Covid-19.

“Not only that, it would also encourage compliance with movement control orders.”

Currently, the main features in the MySejahtera app are geared towards the broad functions of surveillance, contact tracing, information dissemination and vaccination.

On the dependent feature, which was recently included to allow individuals to register their family members for vaccination, Maheshwara said this is to cater for groups who are not tech-savvy or do not have access to MySejahtera.

“In this feature, a family member or employer can act as a guardian and use his or her account to help register family members or employees on MySejahtera,” he said.

“This feature allows the dependent to perform self-assessment, register for vaccination and review his or her Covid-19 test results and vaccination record.

“Check-ins via MySejahtera also do not require persistent internet connectivity, thus making it more accessible to all.”

Check-ins are helpful for the authorities to monitor population movement and places with high traffic.

“Check-ins are proxy to population movement and from this, we are able to obtain information such as most frequently visited places and habits such as increased movement during the weekends when there is a two-fold increase in movement as compared to weekdays in urban versus rural areas,” said Maheshwara.

As of April 19, he said 6.9% of all new Covid-19 cases were detected via the app.

“This amounts to an estimated 25,878 cases in total. On the other hand, about 40% of cases are traced via contact tracing, accounting for 150,021 cases in total,” said Maheshwara.

Malaysia currently has just more than 380,000 Covid-19 cases since the onset of the pandemic. Of this, over 21,000 are active cases (as of April 22).

The MySejahtera app has a few awards to its name. This includes the gold in Quality Service Awards 2021 and the World Information Tech Award.

“The success of MySejahtera has encouraged us to strive harder and provide better services to our users,” Maheshwara said when asked about the recognition.

“We hope that this application will be a major contributor in achieving herd immunity, thus providing a safe nation for all.”

The app was developed through strategic cooperation between the National Security Council, Ministry of Health, Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit and Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission and Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. – April 23, 2021.