Progress made with digital health passes
IBM partners with Salesforce to offer its Digital Health Pass, while IATA says fast progress is being made to bring its digital health credential solution to market
IBM and Salesforce are partnering to provide individuals with a way to manage and share their vaccination and health status. As part of their offering, IBM Digital Health Pass will integrate with the Salesforce Work.com platform in order to give organisations a single hub to help make data-driven decisions. This comes at a time when companies are looking to minimise risk, take action when needed and communicate effectively, which can help safely bring employees back to offices, visitors back to hotels, concert-goers back to music venues and sports fans back to stadiums. With Work.com, organisations are also able to deliver wellness surveys to employees, visitors or travellers, help them schedule necessary Covid-19 tests and vaccinations, and send manual contact tracing alerts if there is potential exposure.
“At the start of the pandemic, many organisations deployed simple Covid-19 screenings, such as self-reported health surveys, to support re-entry to workplaces and other institutions,” said Paul Roma, General Manager at IBM Watson Health. “Now, as testing becomes more widespread and vaccine distribution gets underway, we are expanding the availability of IBM Digital Health Pass with Salesforce to help organisations verify an individual’s vaccine status and any other relevant health credentials.”
Allowing organisations to continue business safely
“With Covid-19 vaccines becoming available, companies and communities around the world are focused on how to safely reopen and get back to public life,” added Bill Patterson, General Manager at CRM Applications at Salesforce. “Our partnership with IBM will give organisations a single platform designed to provide safe and continuous operations, deepen trust with customers and employees and do everything possible to support their health and wellbeing.”
Built on IBM Blockchain technology, the Digital Health Pass is designed to enable organisations to verify health credentials for employees, customers and visitors based on criteria specified by the organisation, such as test results, vaccination records, and temperature checks. For example, once a vaccine is administered, an individual would be issued a verifiable health credential via the IBM Digital Health Pass that would be included only in that individual’s encrypted digital wallet on their smartphone.
Privacy central to the health pass solution
Individuals control what they share, with whom, and for what purpose. Privacy is central to the solution, and the digital wallet can allow individuals to maintain control of their personal health information and enable sharing in a way that is secured, verifiable, and trusted. Individuals can share their health pass without requiring exposure of the underlying personal data used to generate the credential. The solution was developed to be flexible to an organization’s unique needs.
Meanwhile, International Air Transport Association (IATA) Head of Airport, Passenger and Security Products, Alan Murray Hayden, said fast progress is being made to bring its Travel Pass digital health credential solution to market, and ‘most of the world’s biggest airlines will be using it from March’.
IATA health pass development moves at quick pace
“I’ve never in my life seen a project move at such pace,” Hayden said during a webinar hosted by IATA and Evernym. “We have teams of people working 12 hours a day to make this happen and to try to solve this industry problem.”
IATA has developed Travel Pass in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and has built it on top of existing IATA solutions including Timatic, a product used by airlines and travel agents for more than 50 years to verify passenger travel documents.