Third-party apps can now provide service of booking COVID-19 vaccination slots

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NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India, released new guidelines on integration of Co-WIN app (Indian vaccine portal) with third-party applications on May 26. The new guidelines will allow third-party applications to include Co-WIN API (Application Programming Interface) in their own apps.

Until now, only government owned apps including Aarogya Setu and Umang were used to register and book vaccination slots, and third party applications were only allowed to display vaccine status and availability of slots. The inclusion of Co-WIN API will now enable third party app developers to provide services including vaccine registration, appointment booking, etc.

The official notification from the MoHFW said that the new guidelines have been introduced to help various stakeholders such as governments of states and union territories, private service providers, software developers, other agencies in providing vaccine relate services. This will further help in enhancement of the diversity and functionality complementing Co-WIN, offer better user experience and choice to people, and improve access to COVID-19 vaccination.

The guidelines state that third party applications can be either offered directly to citizens or offered to private vaccination centres. Following functionalities are included-

Discover vaccination centres and related information
Schedule appointments
Generate/download certificates
Report any adverse events after vaccination as per the guidelines of Adverse Event Following Immunization.
Manage vaccination workflow

All the third-party applications intending to integrate with CO-WIN will first have to register as Application Service Providers with the GoI. They will also need to go through a prescribed integration and testing process with the Co-WIN APIs. The third party apps after the integration of Co-WIN API will still be using the existing server used by the Co-WIN portal and the Aarogya Setu app.