Blueprint for Digital Health Passes

To help restore travel and restart the global economy the Good Health Pass Collaborative has released a draft blueprint detailing nine technical and interoperability challenges around which consensus must be reached for digital health passes to be globally effective.

The release of the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint has been timed to coincide with the G7 Summit on the 11-13 June in the UK.

In a letter to world leaders in May, the Collaborative stressed the urgent need for international alignment behind a common set of principles and standards for digital health passes, to ensure that they are trusted and universally accepted for international travel.  The letter also called for the formation of a working group of senior ministerial staff from the G7, G20 and EU health and transport ministries, with the task of reaching international consensus on standards by July 16.

Like the rapid international collaboration that happened to develop and distribute COVID-19 vaccinations, the Good Health Pass Collaborative argues that there must now be a similar effort to ensure that verifiable digital health passes for international travel can be issued and universally accepted.  It argues that the absence of internationally-recognised, consensus-based open standards – to which all solutions adhere – could leave individuals uncertain about the security and privacy of their data, and unsure of whether their health pass will be accepted for travel.

The Good Health Pass Collaborative has grown to more than 125 companies and organisations across health, travel, and technology sectors.

The Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint addresses in detail nine technical and interoperability challenges around which global consensus must be reached:

• Design principles
• Creating a consistent user experience
• Standard data models and elements
• Credentials formats, signatures, and exchange protocols
• Security, privacy, and data protection
• Trust registries
• Rules engines
• Identity binding (ensuring the authenticity of the holder)
• Governance

The UK government, in its capacity as president of the G7, has identified “leading the global recovery from coronavirus, while strengthening our resilience against further pandemic” as the highest policy priority for this year’s Summit.