Welcome to our dystopian infernal landscape, where you may soon have to flash your Apple Wallet when you try to enter an airport to prove you’ve been given the covid-19 vaccine.
According to a recent one Bloomberg report, this is the reality faced by residents in Los Angeles, where there is a recent association between apple and the Healthvana welfare app could soon mean vaccination records will be offered digitally to try (hopefully) to encourage people to actually inoculate. Because the virus that causes covid-19 requires a two-shot dose, the logic is that having a digitally stored record of the first shot could help ensure that people are removed quickly. for his second shot and could eventually serve as proof that a person trying to gain access to a grocery store or concert venue has been vaccinated.
Recently, Los Angeles broke its own record of both covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations, leaving health officials struggling to establish a vaccine disbursement plan “as quickly as humanly possible,” said Claire Jarashow. , director of vaccine control and disease prevention in the county department. of Public Health.
While vaccines will be formally monitored at records and patients will be given paper follow-up cards, Jarashow said health officials also had an advantage in giving patients access to their records. digital. benefit from being harder to lose.
“We are really worried. We really want people to come back for this second dose, ”Jarashow told Bloomberg. “We just don’t have the capacity to make hundreds of medical record applications to find the first doses of people and when they need to get the second.”
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Although some patients are likely to be wary of handing over their protected physician data for some Ramin Bastani, CEO of Healthvana, says the company stores its data on Amazon Web Services’ HIPAA-compliant servers, making the application “as secure as we can make it,” according to Jarashow.
“Personally, I would feel comfortable using it, so I hope it is reassuring,” he added.
According to Bloomberg, Healthvana is also in talks with Los Angeles County concert venues, business owners and schools about the application of this technology.“Anyone who has a large number of people interacting with them,” Bastani says, although it adds this it is skeptical that the app will become the de facto mode for identifying your vaccination status.
“It won’t be like a credit card you can use in the United States,” Bastani said he says. “Sometimes you can pay in cash, sometimes you can use your Apple Wallet.”