Apple Wallet app is users digital pocketbook to keep their credit, debit, and other cards. Bloomberg reports that recipients of COVID-19 shots in Los Angeles County, United States can also store proof of COVID-19 shots in their iPhone app to show at check-in at the airport, school, health facilities, and other places.
Having said that, the ability to digitally store COVID-19 vaccination proof is also available on Andriod devices. Healthvana Chief Executive Officer Ramin Bastani said, “It will also give recipients a way to verify they have been vaccinated, which they can put into an Apple Wallet or competing Google platform “to prove to airlines, to prove to schools, to prove to whoever needs it.”
The feature is provided in partnership with Healthvana will roll out this week. As the COVID-19 vaccination includes two doses, the new feature is also designed to ensure that people don’t forget to go in for the second shot. LA county has been marked as a COVID-19 hot spot, and the local authorities worked with Healthvana to pushed digital contact tracing to reduce exposure notification time from hours to minutes.
Healthvana is a HIPAA-secure, mobile-friendly portal for patients to manage their health! We’ve partnered with COVID-19 testing locations to help deliver test results, education, and other relevant information.
Store COVID-19 vaccination proof in the Apple Wallet app
As per the report, the director of vaccine-preventable disease control at the county’s Department of Public Health, Claire Jarashow said that “Los Angeles County last week broke its record of new Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations. It has been racing to distribute vaccines “as quickly as humanly possible.” She also expressed trust in Healthvana as a reliable COVID-19 information platform.
Jarashow explained that vaccinated patients are given a paper card as a record of the first shot and remind for the second but those cards can be easily misplaced/lost. In addition to saving time by pulling records, the health officials are giving patients ownership of their records, and to end that they come back for their second COVID-19 vaccination dose.
“We’re really concerned. We really want people to come back for that second dose,” Jarashow said. And “we just don’t have the capacity to be doing hundreds of medical record requests to find people’s first doses and when they need to get their second.”
Tracking Covid-19 vaccine recipients and authenticating immunization status are poised to become increasingly important in the U.S. and globally as vaccines are rolled out.
The proof of COVID-19 vaccination will be increasingly important moving towards pre-COVID-19 normalcy of being in public gatherings and places. And digital storage space, like the Apple Wallet app, will keep it safe.
However, addressing privacy concerns of giving a company access to citizens’ personal information, Jarashow said that “they had worked through them.”
Healthvana stores the data on Amazon Web Services’ HIPAA-compliant servers, according to Bastani. “It’s as safe as we can make it,” Jarashow said. “Personally I would feel comfortable using it, so I hope that’s reassuring.”
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