Tunisia rolls out digital birth registration in hospitals as health ministry expands pilot

Tunisia's Ministry of Health launched a pilot of fully digital birth registration at several public hospitals on Thursday 12 June, allowing staff to record a newborn's arrival and issue a health booklet in a single step, the ministry said in a communiqué.

The system, built around the Plateforme Nationale de Déclaration des Naissances (PNDN), assigns each baby a national health identifier at the moment of birth and links the record directly to national health databases, according to the ministry's Centre Informatique (CIMS), which oversees the platform.

The ministry said the aim of the pilot is to automate the attribution of newborn health booklets while ensuring that urgent cases continue to receive priority care.

A programme years in the making

The 12 June rollout follows an earlier first deployment: the PNDN entered service at Hôpital Mongi Slim in La Marsa, in the governorate of Tunis, in April 2026, marking what the CIMS described at the time as a first experimental phase intended to be extended progressively to all health facilities nationwide.

A parallel pilot of the national health identifier — a unique code attached to each patient's medical record — had already been carried out at Institut Salah-Azaïez and Hôpital La Rabta, the ministry said. That work trained medical and administrative staff to ensure each patient holds a single, deduplicated record across the system.

Thursday's decision to expand the pilot to several hospitals was taken at a meeting of the ministry's digital-transformation steering committee, held on Wednesday 11 June, according to Tuniscope. The committee reviewed the progress of digitisation projects across the health sector and assessed their readiness for gradual wider deployment.

Citizen health portal nearing launch

The steering committee also reviewed progress on Sihhatouna, a unified national citizen-health portal — also referred to in some sources as "Sahetna" — which will give citizens direct access to their care pathway, medical appointments and their children's health records. The platform is in its final phase of security audit and technical validation, the ministry said, and has not yet opened to the public.

The ministry confirmed in a written response to parliament in March 2026 that it aims to complete the digital transformation of all public hospitals by the end of the year. Measures in progress include the full integration of the national health identifier and the digitisation of school and university medical files.

Under existing Tunisian civil law, births must be registered with the relevant municipal civil-status office within ten days. The PNDN addresses the parallel health-administrative pathway — the assignment of a health record and booklet — rather than the civil registration requirement itself.