Call it the vaccine card shuffle. Walk up to a restaurant or prepare to enter a sports arena or concert venue, and pull out your wallet to flash your vaccine card, which gets crinklier each time. Or maybe you have your card saved as a screenshot on your phone, so you have to scroll through your photos — which keep growing — to find the picture.
None of this is terribly inconvenient, but it’s all a bit…haphazard. There’s also a proliferation of fake vaccine cards, which makes displaying your vax creds not especially iron-clad proof that you are in fact vaccinated.
As more governments require people to show proof of their COVID-19 vaccines to engage in public life, needing easy access to your proof of vax is only going to become more common, and important. Moreover, people checking vaccines need to be sure that what they’re seeing is legit.
That’s where digital vaccine cards, and easy systems for storing, accessing, and verifying them, come in. With iOS 15, Apple users can add digital records of their vaccines to Apple Health Records. In the upcoming iOS 15.1, you’ll be able to add them to your Apple Wallet, too.
Credit: apple
Not only will the cards be more organized and easier to access this way, but they also contain scannable QR codes that make them “verifiable.” Essentially, a scanner will be able to tell a real vaccine card from a fake one.
How is a centralized system like this possible? How can you be part of it (and should you)? How official is a “verifiable” vaccine record, really? If you’ve got questions about how to make your iPhone an easy way to access your verifiable vaccine record, we’ve got answers.
1. What is a digital vaccine card?
A digital vaccine card is the digital version of the vaccine card you received when you got vaccinated. It contains the same information: Your name, date of birth, your dose dates, and the kind of vaccine you received. The health agency, doctor’s office, or pharmacy that administered your shots, or a company they’ve partnered with, will issue this digital version to you, usually via email or text message.
2. What makes a digital vaccine card “verifiable”?
The “verifiable” part is a bit trickier. A verifiable vaccine record contains a QR code that someone can scan to confirm that the information is legitimate and comes from a reputable source. But that’s easier said than done.
The United States’ healthcare system is fragmented, and there’s not a central vaccine registry. Last summer, a nonprofit called the Commons Project recognized that, despite those hurdles, the country was going to need to standardize the way it stores COVID vaccine records if places like restaurants or airlines were going to be sure that the people they were admitting were indeed vaccinated.
The organization gathered important players in the electronic health records space, as well as some governments, and agreed upon a technical format in which everyone would store the same vaccine information. The result is a “SMART” digital vaccine record.
“The key was how can we get all of those [entities] to use the exact same technology and the exact same format of QR code and the stuff that gets bundled into that QR code, so that when I go to one place, and you go to another, and everybody else goes somewhere else, we can all show our same QR code to the same scanner app,” JP Pollak, the chief product officer at The Commons Project said.
Beyond using the same technical format, there are a few other important pieces of the puzzle to create a “verifiable” card. Within this system, there’s a list of “trusted issuers,” such as pharmacies or state health agencies, so each QR code has a key that shows the source is legitimate. It also contains a code that confirms the information has not been tampered with.
Credit: the commons project
These three qualifications — that the record uses the same technical format as every other record, that it is digitally “signed” by a trusted issuer, and that it has a key showing it hasn’t been tampered with — are what constitute a “verifiable” vaccine record.
3. How does verification actually work?
A QR code isn’t much good if you’re just going to look at it as a screenshot.
“Just because somebody holds up their document and it has a QR code on it doesn’t actually mean that it’s real,” Pollak said. “Until you scan it and get back confirmation.”
To verify the SMART record, it has to be scanned. When it’s scanned, the app will confirm if it’s official or not.
Credit: Screenshot: The commons project
The Commons Project had to step in here, too. It created the SMART health card verifier app, a QR reader capable of understanding the information contained in a SMART Health Card. Any restaurant, bar, or venue can use the app to scan the records, and a green check mark will appear if the record passes muster. Then, that data is deleted, so there isn’t a record kept within the app.
4. How do I get one of these verifiable digital vaccine records?
It depends where you were vaccinated. If you got your vaccine at a major pharmacy like CVS or Walgreens, you can sign into those companies’ websites to get your record. If you got your vaccine through your doctor’s office, and your doctor’s office uses Cerner or Epic to manage health records, you can sign into the app your doctor’s office uses to find it there. Finally, if you got vaccinated by government-run sites in Louisiana, Virginia, Hawaii, California, or New York, each of those states have online portals where you can get a copy. Washington will soon be issuing SMART records, too; Pollak said about 20 states are slated to make them available soon.
Once you get your digital vaccine record with that scannable QR code, there are a few things you can do. You can save it as a screenshot in your photos — make sure to favorite it for easy access. You can also print it out if you want a paper copy. Or, most recently, if you’re an iPhone user, you can store it in a more official capacity on your iPhone by adding it to your Health Records, and soon, your Apple Wallet.
5. How do I add it to Apple Health?
There are a few methods.
If you got your vaccine from a major pharmacy, or from a doctor’s office that uses the MyChart (Epic) or HealthLife (Cerner) patient portals:
Open your Apple Health app, go to the Browse tab, and scroll down to “Health Records.” There, press the “Add Account” button, and you can connect your iPhone with your medical records. Then, your COVID vaccine information will get automatically added to your Immunizations tab.
Credit: apple
If you got your vaccine from a government health provider:
Navigate to your state’s health portal to request access to a copy. Your state will then send you a card over email or text message.
If you open your digital record on your computer or on a second screen, you can use your iPhone to scan the QR code. Then, just like an “open menu” link prompt will pop up while you scan a QR code at a restaurant, you’ll get a prompt to “Add to health records.” Click it!
If you download your digital record on your iPhone, save it to your Files on your iPhone. For California’s interface, there is a button that says “Works with Apple Health Records.” Click that button, and you’ll be able to save it.
Then, navigate to your Files app (you can use the iPhone search bar). You can open the file, and then press and hold. Pressing and holding results in the same “Add to health records” prompt. Click it, and voila! When you open the Health app, you’ll have an icon that says “Immunization records.” Click that, and you’ll be able to get to your Smart health card without having to scroll through your photos.
6. How do I add it to Apple Wallet?
When Apple releases iOS 15.1, you can repeat the same steps as the above. Instead of saying “Add to Health records,” the new prompt will be “Add to Health records and Wallet.” Just like your credit card or boarding pass, your vaccine pass will be available as one of your cards to scroll through.
Credit: apple
7. Why would I want to add these records to my iPhone?
More and more governments are requiring that businesses verify a patron’s vaccine status before allowing them to come inside. That means not just flashing a screenshot or paper card, but making your info scannable and verifiable, too.
Adding these records to your iPhone is about safety and convenience. It allows businesses to know that you are actually vaccinated. And it allows you to get to your vaccine records with the click of the button. That’s especially true for Apple Wallet access, since all you need to do for that is double tap the side button and let Face ID give you access. Easy-peasy.
8. Are the records private and secure when they’re stored and scanned?
Apple stores all of your immunization data on your device, so no one has access to it but you. And when you scan it, it’s encrypted while the data travels from your phone through the scanner app. Then, the scanner app does not save any information.
“The app does nothing other than analyze the records on your device, show you a snapshot of it, and then delete the data,” Pollak said. “No healthcare data or personal information is ever stored, and people can’t really get a copy of it.”
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If a business is using a different scanner app, the Commons Project has verifier guidelines and terms that require it to not keep data. The Commons Project also built privacy into the design by minimizing the data it actually contains about you. There’s no email address, no phone number, no weird advertising pixels. Just the information about when you got vaccinated.
9. What if I get a booster shot? Will I need a new record?
Yes. Since these cards are issued and digitally stamped — just like a paper document — they are not dynamic and don’t communicate with your healthcare provider. If you get a booster shot and want your vaccine card to reflect that, you’ll need to generate a new record.
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