Health Credentials

Full Title or Meme

How Health Credentials can be converted to a strictly digital format.

Sources of Health Credentials

When You Get Vaccinated

• CDC expectations about COVID-19 vaccinations.
• You should receive a vaccination card or printout that tells you what COVID-19 vaccine you received, the date you received it, and where you received it.
• You should receive a paper or electronic version of a fact sheet that tells you more about the specific COVID-19 vaccine you are being offered. Each authorized COVID-19 vaccine has its own fact sheet that contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving that specific vaccine.
• All people who get a COVID-19 vaccine should be monitored on-site. Learn more about COVID-19 vaccines and rare severe allergic reactions.

From a Government Database

In the US each state (and some other entities) keep vaccination records, primarily for public health reasons. IIS

Problems

Every technologist seems to feel that they have the solution to any societal problem. COVID has proved to be a good example of the many technologists with no Healthcare experience providing a wide array of potential solutions. Very few of these are well-though-out.

• Harry Halpin offers A Critique of Immunity Passports and W3C Decentralized Identifiers that describes some of the problems in broad strokes.

• Discrimination is the single purpose of all Health Credentials. As such they will inevitably be used against people for all sorts of ignoble purposes. In China a health credential can be turned red for political purposes that have no health purpose.

Solutions

Credentials installed on a Smartphone

• Lumedic Launches New Digital Health Passport That Offers Providence Patients Secure Digital Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination Status in conjunction with Providence hospitals, like Swedish. A simple green check mark alerts businesses that the individual has been vaccinated, with no transfer of any other personal health information. The technology is optional for patients and health care systems, and offers a secure alternative to paper cards.

Designs that Require No Smartphone

US - Change Healthcare (soon to be part of United-Optum) unveiled its Vaccine Passport (GR 12/30/20) at the Nashville Healthcare Council. It's interesting for 3 reasons: (1) there's no app for an individual to have to download, (2) it siphons vaccine data flowing through it's payor clearinghouse pipes (without prior patient knowledge/ approval, which it also uses it to confirm the requestor's identity), and (3) Change Healthcare (formerly Emdeon) has been strictly a B-B company with very little consumer facing product and strictly within healthcare, but this is a consumer-facing product interacting with a wide variety of industries so a pretty big step outside their core model.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9NwOCkuelc&feature=youtu.be
• https://www.changehealthcare.com/covid-19/digital-vaccination-records

References

• Lumedic Launches New Digital Health Passport That Offers Providence Patients Secure Digital Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination Status in conjunction with Providence hospitals, like Swedish
• Privacy in Pandemic: Law, Technology, and Public Health in the COVID-19 Crisis Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Volume 52, Issue 3 (Mar. 2021 Forthcoming)