Singapore Has Introduced a Blockchain-Backed Health Passport

In the state of the pandemic in the current year, the entire world learned the value of having health data available for every individual. While many countries are still trying to fight off the disasters of the COVID-19, the global health institutes have stressed upon the data related to every patient’s health.

As per the health institutes, having a background of a patient’s health and medical condition would prove to be very vital given the current circumstances. It would assist doctors and medical researchers in finding the solution for ‘Coronavirus’, much faster than its taking at present.

Singapore is one of the countries that addressed the lack of health data collection and the surveillance of such cases. Therefore, Singapore has decided to bring the blockchain industry in on this. With the help of blockchain technology, they aim to build a framework that would help them collect the required data.

In order to achieve this goal, the Government of Singapore has brought together SGInnovate and Accredited. SGInnovate is a Singapore Government-Owned investment firm and Accredify is a Singaporean startup that promotes OpenCerts Schema.

The Government of Singapore has brought these firms together to develop a digital health passport. This digital health passport will be backed by the new blockchain, which is to be developed with the joint efforts of both firms.

It is also reported that both firms have been given a deadline till May 2021 to come up with a plan to create the most critical application of the entire project. This application will be responsible for storing the personal health data in a digital wallet. This digital wallet will be based on the blockchain technology.

Both firms have already carried out a successful pilot for the particular application back in July 2020. It was observed that the application successfully verified the digitally encrypted documents and was able to store them as well.

In addition to the general medical data collection, the application was able to do the same for COVID-19 discharge memos, immunity proof, swab results, and vaccination records. Teams from both firms performed around 1.5 million test-runs and all of them came back with a positive outcome.