A health care worker receives an appointment card after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at Clarendon Health McLeod Hospitals in Manning, South Carolina.
© 2020 Bloomberg Finance LP
At a reception you usually come with your ticket, electronically or physically, and you are ready to be scanned. Now consider going to that one show and, while someone is scanning your ticket, they will also ask for your vaccine ID. So you pull it up on your phone and let them scan it too, allowing the center to confirm that you are up to date on your Covid-19 vaccine. Only then will you get to see the show.
This is not a long position. A group of businesses from the healthcare sector are teaming up to create digital vaccine ID cards that validate Covid-19 vaccine status. In the future these cards, which can be stored on smartphones and other digital devices, may be needed to access restaurants, bars, schools and planes. This is a step that may be necessary to reopen the economy as soon as possible.
“We hope to be able to get vaccinated people back into the workplace quickly,” said Joan Harvey, president of care solutions in Evernorth. Evernorth is one of the organizations working to develop these ID cards, along with MITER, Cerner, Epic, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Project Commons and other major companies. Together they are putting together the Vaccine Credit Initiative, which aims to create an affordable, secure way to verify the Covid-19 vaccine status. These SMART health cards act as an encrypted vaccine that can be stored in any digital wallet. For those who don’t have smartphones, says Brian Anderson, MITER’s chief digital health doctor, it’s easy to store the vaccine records on a paper QR code. ”
Although some of the companies that have joined the consortium have never worked before, representatives say they are united by a desire to end the pandemic as soon as possible. possible. For example, Cerner and Epic, two of the largest electronic medical record companies in the country, have joined forces with the consortium and are working together to create an ID card that will be easily integrated with the the company has two platforms. “Pandemics have incredible catalytic power to bring together interstitial partners,” Anderson says, “partners who may be competitors otherwise. “And while the consortium is made up of companies from the private sector, they also work closely with the government,” he said.
Vaccine ID cards are not a new idea. Several countries already require testing for vaccines against diseases such as Yellow Fever before travelers can enter. Even now, health care workers who received the Covid-19 vaccine have a white paper that lists the date of the vaccine. But vaccine ID cards like this would be “at a completely different level,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease doctor. This may be the first time a vaccine test is needed to do things that were previously dead, such as eating at a restaurant or going to work. In fact, Kuppalli says, “I think there are a lot of ethical issues that we need to think about before we go down this path. ”
R. Alta Charo, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, agrees that there are a number of ethical barriers that may arise. While public and private bodies may test vaccination as a condition of entry, she says, there will always be exceptions. “Private employers could make vaccination a general requirement for workers in devolved states,” she says, “but there would have to be exceptions for anti-medication workers, those who is disabled and unable to receive the vaccine, and possibly for those with a religious complaint. ”
While it remains to be seen whether workplaces or schools will need Covid-19 vaccines, life may just be a lot easier once you can confirm that you have been vaccinated. “We already work with most major airlines,” as well as many hotels, said Paul Meyer, Chief Executive of the Commons Project. While it will be up to a number of institutions to ask people to confirm that they have been vaccinated against Covid-19, Meyer says, “there will be a huge demand through consumers. ”
So, when will these new vaccine ID cards become available? “Hopefully within the next month or two,” Meyer said, “certainly within this calendar year.” And eventually these vaccine ID cards could be used for more than just the Covid-19 vaccine.They could be a secure, easy-to-carry way to have your entire health record at the push of a button, making it easier to be treated by different doctors, especially in emergencies.