Employers with mandates turning to vaccine passports to verify status: 7 things to know

While hundreds of hospitals and health systems are mandating COVID-19 vaccines for their staff, companies are looking for the best way to obtain and store employees' vaccine statuses, according to an Aug. 19 Washington Post report.

Seven things to know:

1. Google turned to One Medical as one of the services it uses to verify vaccination records of its contract workers and employees, in the U.S. Workers are being asked to send proof of vaccination to One Medical through its app or web portal.
   
   
2. One Medical uses a team of human reviewers to manually review each vaccination card. One Medical said it's integrated with several state vaccine databases that it can pull patient records from.
   
   
3. The Vaccination Credential Initiative, a collective of organizations including Cerner, Epic and Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, was launched to provide a way to verify a patient's vaccination status.
   
   
4. The vaccine credential has a person's date of birth, the date they got their doses, the brand of vaccine and its lot number. Cerner launched the capabilities to its hospital and health system clients and more than 80,000 people have downloaded the credential, a spokesperson for Cerner told Becker's.
   
   
5. The initiative was initially unveiled in January. Companies participating in the initiative include Mayo Clinic, Cerner, Epic, Microsoft, Salesforce, Change Healthcare and Oracle. Cerner said it was unable to speak to when other companies would launch the credential for their customers.
   
   
6. Some employers are using ReturnSafe to help verify the vaccination status of their workforce. After an employee uploads a vaccination card to the app, a human at ReturnSafe checks to make sure the record matches the employee, that the person had two doses of an approved vaccine and that at least two weeks has passed since the last vaccination. The app notifies an employee’s status within 24 hours to the company.
   
   
7. ReturnSafe also offers the ability to link to certain health systems. It can also track COVID-19 test results, contact tracing and control badge access based on whether an employee meets the health requirements for entry.