Los Angeles County partnered with health startup Healthvana to roll out a new digital offering that allows residents to store records of their COVID-19 vaccination in Apple Wallet or on a similar Google platform, according to a Dec. 28 Press Herald report.
The offering aims to ensure people receive both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by sending out follow-up notifications before a second appointment. The digital record will also give recipients a way to verify they have been vaccinated.
Los Angeles County is home to about 10 million residents; as of Dec. 22, the county had administered at least 38,850 doses of the Pfizer vaccine to healthcare providers, long-term care facility residents and paramedics. While immunizations are tracked in registries, public health officials saw the need to give patients ownership of their own records as the paper card tracking their vaccine details could be easily lost, said Claire Jarashow, vaccine preventable disease control director at L.A.'s public health department, according to the report.
"We're really concerned. We really want people to come back for that second dose," Ms. Jarashow said. "[And] we just don't have the capacity to be doing hundreds of medical record requests to find people's first doses and when they need to get their second."
Ms. Jarashow said the department has worked through issues around granting Healthvana, which delivers test results to patients for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, access to resident's protected health information. The software platform stores the data on Amazon Web Services' servers, which are HIPAA compliant, according to Healthvana CEO Ramin Bastani.