TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin has claimed that the COVID-19 mobile contact tracing app PeduliLindungi has helped prevent more than 626,000 positive patients or close contacts from transmitting the disease during the pandemic.

"Indonesia has committed to a digital breakthrough with the testing and tracing app PeduliLindungi, which has been downloaded by more than 104 million Indonesians," Sadikin said at a working meeting with Commission IX of the House of Representatives (DPR), which was followed online from on Tuesday.

According to the minister, the application is used by up to 34 million users per week to log their visits to public places, monitor their COVID-19 status, including close contact cases, and access vaccine certificates.

"The application has been a potent digital technology-based surveillance mechanism that was massively utilized during the pandemic," he noted.

Meanwhile, the second breakthrough made during the COVID-19 pandemic has been telemedicine services, which have catered to at least 1.8 million patients placed in self-isolation after testing COVID-19 positive, Sadikin said.

"We also provide direct medicine delivery services to patients' homes in 14 major cities in Indonesia, together with 17 telemedicine and logistics start-up companies, to relieve pressure on hospitals," the minister expounded.

According to the telemedicine service report for the January 17–December 31, 2022, period, around 32 percent of 1.82 million COVID-19-positive patients accessed the service, and 94 percent of the service users received their COVID-19 medicine package at home.

The COVID-19 telemedicine service covers the Greater Jakarta area, Greater Bandung area, Greater Surakarta area, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Greater Malang area, Denpasar, Palembang, Medan, Banjarmasin, Balikpapan, Manado, and Makassar.

Earlier, Sadikin shared his vision of the PeduliLindungi application emerging as an individual health data bank and Satu Sehat as a platform for monitoring public health status after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

The PeduliLindungi application will be integrated with the Satu Sehat platform, whose function will not be limited to storing vaccine information and scanning, but extend to checking children's immunization and providing the results of laboratory blood checks, general check-ups, CT scans, and MRIs, he informed.

ANTARA

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