Recipients of Los Angeles vaccines can put the test on Apple Wallet

Photographer: Eric Lee / Bloomberg

Recipients of the Covid-19 vaccine in Los Angeles County, one of the most important points of the virus, will be offered a digital record that will help them get a second chance and that can eventually be used to access concerts or air flights.

The offer is offered from this week through a collaboration with the startup Healthvana. Initially, it is aimed at ensuring that people receive doses from two-shot regimes authorized in the United States, including follow-up notifications before a second appointment.

It will also give recipients a way to verify that they have been vaccinated, which they can put on an Apple Wallet or on a competing Google platform “to show the airlines, to show the schools, to show who needs it,” he said. say Healthvana CEO Ramin Bastani.

Los Angeles-based Healthvana, founded in late 2014, operates a software platform that provides test results to patients to detect HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. He began working with the county earlier this year to provide Covid-19 test results to patients.

These previous relationships with area residents made the startup a good fit for digital vaccine registration, said Claire Jarashow, director of vaccine preventable disease control at the county Department of Public Health.

Last week, Los Angeles County broke the record for new Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations. It has been commonplace to distribute vaccines “as quickly as humanly possible,” Jarashow said.

While vaccinations are tracked in the records, public health officials also saw the need to give patients ownership of their own records, Jarashow said. They will receive a paper card to keep track of the vaccine they received and when, but it could be easily lost.

“We are really worried. We really want people to come back for this second dose, ”Jarashow said. And “we just don’t have the ability to make hundreds of medical record applications to find the first doses of people and when they need to get the second.”

Monitoring of Covid-19 vaccine recipients and vaccination status authentication is about to become increasingly important in the U.S. and globally as vaccines are developed.

This caused a competes between players like International Business Machines Corp. to provide technological solutions, imagining a world in which vaccination records can be used to give access to places where people can gather or be very close. With private health records involved, these efforts have also raised issues of ethical and privacy issues.

Software platform

Healthvana also offered more capabilities than a platform used to run Covid-19 vaccination clinics called PrepMod. However, at least initially, the county will integrate, clean up and process PrepMod data and other records every night on Healthvana.

Jarashow acknowledged the problems related to granting a company access to protected health information from residents, but said they had worked through them. Healthvana stores the data on Amazon Web Servers that comply with HIPAA services, according to Bastani.

“It’s as safe as we can get,” Jarashow said. “I personally would feel comfortable to use, so I hope that is reassuring. “

General population

The county had administered at least 38,850 doses of The Pfizer Inc. vaccine, just under half of its allocation, to health care providers, residents of long-term care facilities and paramedics as of Dec. 22. population, Jarashow said.

With about 10 million residents, Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the United States

Healthvana is also discussing with concert venues, entrepreneurs, universities and schools about the application of this technology, “anyone who has a large number of people interacting with them,” Bastani said. But he believes it is unlikely that any such service will become the standard.

“It won’t be like a credit card you can use in the United States,” he said. “Sometimes you can pay in cash, sometimes you can use your Apple Wallet.”