Microsoft and Salesforce Plan Digital COVID Vaccine Passport

The Vaccination Credential Initiative will build digital vaccination records for smartphone wallets.

Need to Know

  • The Vaccination Credential Initiative includes Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as and Oracle and the Mayo Clinic.
  • The initiative will develop technology that allows people who have been vaccinated to store an immunization record in the digital wallet of their choice.
  • The companies also aim to develop new standards for confirming whether a person has received the vaccine.

Analysis

Some of the tech industry’s biggest players have teamed up to launch a new COVID-19 vaccination passport project.

Microsoft and Salesforce are joining Oracle and the Mayo Clinic for the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which plans to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination record, via the smart wallet of their choice, such as Apple Wallet or Google Pay. To do this, the coalition is using the open SMART Health Cards specification, based on W3C Verifiable Credential and HL7 FHIR standards, which is a standard that makes health records accessible regardless of the provider.

“Salesforce is proud to join the Vaccination Credential Initiative to help organizations easily and safely customize all aspects of the vaccination management lifecycle and integrate closely with other coalition members’ offerings, which will help us all get back to public life,” said Bill Patterson, executive vice president and general manager, CRM Applications at Salesforce. “With a single platform to help deliver safe and continuous operations and deepen trust with customers and employees, this coalition will be crucial to support public health and wellbeing.”

The Vaccine Credential Initiative also aims to develop new standards to confirm whether a person has or hasn’t received a COVID-19 vaccine. Overall, the goal of the initiative, by developing reliable, standardized digital immunization records that are accessible to individuals, is to make the return to work and travel more safe, reliable, and seamless, once individuals do receive their COVID-19 vaccine.

Other participants in the initiative include CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic, Evernorth, MITRE, and Safe Health.

Microsoft has already been working to deploy technological solutions to vaccine distribution, having partnered with EY in December to launch the EY Vaccine Management Solution, an end-to-end solution that helps manage the manufacture and distribution process of the vaccine. Salesforce, too, has already deployed vaccination tools, having launched a COVID vaccine distribution tracker within Work.com in September that will track dosage, inventory, syringe supply, and refrigeration capacity, among other data sets.