Proving you're vaccinated against COVID-19 could be as easy as pulling out your phone in the future.
This week, one company started giving a digital vaccine record to people getting the shot in Los Angeles County.
Healthvana is partnering with the county to help make sure people get both doses of the vaccine. The company is also talking with other states to bring this technology there.
“Right now, that's the status quo is you'll get a piece of paper that will say, ‘hey you got a Pfizer vaccination, come back in this amount of days,’ and we think it's a complimentary feature to have something that goes onto your phone in a way that you can kind of capture,” said Ramin Bastani, CEO of Healthvana.
People have to opt in to get vaccine information digitally. Then they enter their name and birthdate into the Healthvana system to get access. From there, they can screenshot their vaccine record on their phone or put it into apple wallet.
“You can use it when you want to use it. As a patient or as a person, you may want to use it to show your school and airline if they require it or an employer, so it's pretty much our whole goal in this to make sure we get the information to the patient in a way they can have it at their fingertips,” said Bastani.
The company says this isn't an immunity passport like some people have been talking about. That's because they don't know yet who's going to accept this digital record from your phone.
But they tell us everyone from event planning companies to airlines and universities have contacted them about using the technology.
Healthvana says it has experience keeping private health information secure from its years of delivering HIV test results to patients. It stores data on Amazon Web Service's HIPAA-compliant servers.
