IBM Digital Health Pass for Citizen Reported COVID-19 Testing Data

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Philomena Fritz | 2 months ago | in Submit Capstone Project - Sunday November 29 Midnight ET Deadline

5 min Video of Capstone Project

Elevator Pitch

Highly differentiated approach to collecting diagnostic data in near real-time for early signal detection. Citizen centricity by design.

Challenge Goals

HHS seeks new ways for collecting, standardizing, and reporting COVID-19 diagnostic data. Suppression of the novel coronavirus, especially in the absence of an effective vaccine, requires adoption of multiple layers of measures at the organizational and individual levels. Success for what will be broadly adopted depends on the feasibility of implementation and effectiveness in diverse social contexts. This solution addresses each of the defined design sprint goals.

Feasibility

The IBM Digital Health Pass solution is a commercial product: 

https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ibm-wat...tal-health-pass

Design

Digital Health Pass provides secure, easy-to-access, trusted, and near real-time citizen health status. It is a blockchain-based tracking system leveraging Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform to support decentralized secure verification of healthcare status claims. The privacy-preserving technology makes it well-suited for healthcare-related use cases.

When partners approached IBM seeking 'return to society' solutions at the onset of the pandemic, we used a collaborative framework to design the solution. Defining success included design thinking sessions with stakeholders, identifying key aspects of workflow, integration points, and functionality. We rapidly conducted a pilot to integrate and test with a partner and have a study with NIH.

Innovation

Designed to help support entities in operationalizing data-driven policies (e.g., public health orgs, large employers, etc.).

Insights: Generate new insights by leveraging new data sets that could otherwise be unattainable due to lack of privacy-preserving technologies.

Industry Standards: Allows exchange and verification of credentials (data) across ledgers with w3c standards.

Privacy Preserving: Verifiable credentialed approach to sensitive personal information.

Flexibility & Scalability

Cloud Platform can help to rapidly deploy the solution.

Open Standards provide interoperability with any solutions conforming to the w3c standards for decentralized identity, and support flow of verifiable and trusted data across a global standards-based eco-system.

Will need to work with HHS and a diverse set of trusted public and private stakeholders to get the solution widely deployed.

Sustainability & Extensibility

Given the challenges of reporting healthcare data with multiple formats used, the ultimate goal is to drive to a national standard. In an attempt to move towards that standard we will do a combination of direct data mapping to WATERS and to most quickly integrate with WATERS, will also pursue unstructured data ingestion.

We have ongoing discussions with states and jurisdictions around use of the technology for COVID-19 vaccinations and managing and enhancing the citizen journey through that process (e.g., reporting of immunization as well as the bi-directional involvement that can be used for vx boosters reminders). Other uses are return to society applications such as live events (e.g., stadium/sports events, concerts, etc.) and air travel.

Team & Collaboration

HHS needs high confidence in the validity and the reliability of the technologies deployed and outcomes. IBM understands the importance of providing HHS with the right resources at the right time to support this critical effort. To that end, the IBM team brings a blend of technical and scientific expertise, including experts in health equity, data science, Internet of Things, DevOps, and project and product management.

Additional Comments

What Team(s) contributed to this Capstone Project?

IBM but look forward to partnering more broadly in the next phase 

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