Health & Tech Industry Leaders Create Vaccination Credential Initiative

Vaccination record systems have existed since the 1700s, but the current system doesn’t really enable convenient access, control, and sharing of verifiable vaccination records. To plug this gap, health and technology industry leaders have come together to announce the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI). The initiative comes at a good time as the vaccination drives for the COVID-19 pandemic are starting to happen.

The Vaccination Credential Initiative will enable digital access to vaccination records using the open, interoperable SMART Health Cards specification, based on W3C Verifiable Credential and HL7 FHIR standards. To make this happen, bigwigs from both the healthcare and technology industry are contributing, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and Epic, as well as the Mayo Clinic, Safe Health, Change Healthcare, and the CARIN Alliance.

“The goal of the Vaccination Credential Initiative is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records so they can use tools like CommonPass to safely return to travel, work, school, and life, while protecting their data privacy,” said Paul Meyer, CEO of The Commons Project Foundation. “Open standards and interoperability are at the heart of VCI's efforts and we look forward to supporting the World Health Organization and other global stakeholders in implementing and scaling open global standards for health data interoperability.”

The VCI will empower individuals to access an encrypted copy of their immunization credentials to store in a digital wallet. They can receive it in even a paper printed format with QR codes containing W3C verifiable credentials.