At a concert you usually come with your ticket, either electronic or physical, and stand ready to have it scanned. Now imagine going to that same show and, while someone is scanning your ticket, they also ask for your vaccine ID. So you pull it up on your phone and let them scan it, too, allowing the venue to verify you’re up to date on your Covid-19 vaccine. It’s only then that you are allowed to see the show.
This isn’t a far-fetched scenario. A group of businesses from the healthcare sector are banding together to create digital vaccine ID cards that verify Covid-19 vaccination status. In the future these cards, which can be stored on smartphones and other digital devices, may be required to gain entry into restaurants, bars, schools and airplanes. It’s a step that might be necessary in order to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.
“Hopefully, we can quickly bring people who are vaccinated back into the workplace,” says Joan Harvey, president of care solutions at Evernorth. Evernorth is one of the groups working to develop these ID cards, along with Mitre, Cerner, Epic, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, The Commons Project and other major companies. Together they’re forming the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which plans to create an accessible, secure way to prove Covid-19 vaccination status. These SMART health cards will be an encrypted vaccine record that can be stored in any digital wallet. For those that don’t have smartphones, says Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at Mitre, the vaccine records can “easily be stored on a paper QR code.”
Though some of the companies that have joined the coalition have never worked together before, representatives say that they’ve been united by a desire to end the pandemic as soon as possible. For example, Cerner and Epic, two of the largest competing electronic medical records companies in the country, have both joined the coalition and are working together to create an ID card that will easily integrate with both of the company’s platforms. “A pandemic has an incredible catalytic power to bring together nontraditional partners,” Anderson says, “partners that might otherwise be competitors.” And while the coalition is made up of companies from the private sector, they’re also working closely with the government, he adds.
Read the full profile on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2021/01/14/a-new-coalition-forms-to-make-digital-vaccine-id-cards-a-reality/?sh=4509fb6f8b7e
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.