A coalition of technology and healthcare providers in the US has launched an initiative to develop a solution that will enable individuals to store and access their Covid-19 vaccination records in their digital wallet “in a secure, verifiable and privacy preserving way”.

The Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) “is developing a standard model for organisations administering Covid-19 vaccines to make credentials available in an accessible, interoperable digital format,” the coalition says.

“Trustworthy, traceable, verifiable and universally recognised digital records of vaccination status are urgently needed worldwide to safely enable people to return to work, school, events, and travel.”

“The current vaccination record system does not readily support convenient access, control and sharing of verifiable vaccination records,” the coalition adds.

“VCI coalition members are working to enable digital access to vaccination records using the open, interoperable Smart Health Cards specification, based on W3C Verifiable Credential and HL7 FHIR standards.

“VCI’s vision is to empower individuals to obtain an encrypted digital copy of their immunisation credentials to store in a digital wallet of their choice.

“Those without smartphones could receive paper printed with QR codes containing W3C-verifiable credentials.”

VCI coalition partners include healthcare and health information technology providers Carin Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic, Evernorth and Oracle, Safe Health, as well as the Mayo Clinic academic medical centre, tech giant Microsoft, not-for-profit interdisciplinary project Mitre and customer relationship management platform provider Salesforce.

Plans to pilot a digital immunity and vaccination passport in the UK were revealed earlier this week.

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