1/19/2021

With coronavirus vaccines rolling out across the United States, businesses and schools are considering how and what it will take to safely resume in-person operations.

Some of the country’s biggest tech firms and health care organizations have joined together to help facilitate that return to “normal.” The group, called the Vaccine Credential Initiative, wants to ensure that everyone has access to a secure, digital record of their Covid-19 vaccination — like a digital vaccine passport — that can be stored in people’s smartphones. The records could be used for everything from airline travel to entering concert venues.

The coalition is made up of a broad range of health care and tech leaders, including Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Cerner, Cigna’s Healthcare, health care software firm Epic and the Mayo Clinic, among others.

Although it’s still early in the vaccination process, potential use cases for such a technology are already cropping up. Some companies, including Dollar General and Instacart, plan to pay their workers to get vaccinated. Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner has said that once children have access to vaccines, all district students must get immunized before returning to their classrooms. And some experts expect that states and countries currently requiring negative Covid-19 test results for incoming travelers will eventually also accept vaccination records.

The importance of digital records
The Vaccine Credential Initiative wants to create an open-source, standard model for how hospitals, pharmacies and clinics administering Covid-19 vaccines make digital records of immunizations, which can be provided to the patients who want them.

Immunizations are typically tracked by writing them down on a paper card for people to store with their important records, and in a patient’s electronic medical records.

But for a number of reasons, the Covid-19 vaccination required developing a different system. For one thing, coronavirus vaccination records will need to be more easily transported if people have to use them to access schools, offices and event venues, making a digital record more practical. They also need to be “interoperable,” meaning all organizations administering the shots should use the same model for recording vaccine credentials.

If you want to travel next year, you may need a vaccine passport
It’s not just for health care purposes that you’ll need this data. Now you are going to need either your lab results or vaccination data to get on an airplane, to go to school, go to work — real life, non-health-care use cases.

The Covid-19 vaccination record also needs to be verifiable and secure in a way that was less important for past vaccination records — otherwise, a person could try to fake having gotten the Covid-19 vaccine by using someone else’s record.

Ultimately, patients will likely receive an encrypted, digital copy of the vaccination record — think a QR code — that can be stored in a digital wallet. That way, an airport gate agent, for example, could confirm that a person was vaccinated without viewing all their personal health information.

The role of tech firms
This is not the first time Big Tech has gotten involved in the effort to fight coronavirus. Early on in the pandemic, Apple and Google joined forces to develop a bluetooth-based system to notify users if they’d been exposed to Covid-19. But the tool’s success (or lack thereof) was hindered by slow and spotty adoption.

With the Vaccine Credential Initiative, the tech companies involved will play a key role in ensuring widespread use. Firms like Microsoft and Oracle manage the tech infrastructure for many large health care systems, and can build in the standards for Covid-19 vaccine credentialing.

A potential pitfall of such a system is inequality; someone without a smartphone would be unable to access a convenient “digital record” of their vaccine. However, the Vaccine Credential Initiative says it plans to provide such patients with a paper printed with a QR code containing the record.

What do you think.
Do you want Big Tech handling your personal, private health information? Although I agree we need to do something to help get back to normal, I’m always a little skeptical when Tech Giants want to give me something for nothing. After all – what could possibly go wrong???