Singaporean government investment firm develops blockchain digital health passport. Singapore is turning to blockchain technology for the infrastructure that will make it work in a pandemic age of unparalleled health data collection and surveillance.
According to a report on September 30th, government-owned investment firm SGInnovate and Singaporean startup Accredify have jointly developed a new blockchain-powered digital health passport.
Development work on the application started in May enables personal medical data to be stored in a digital wallet protected by a blockchain.
In July, a successful pilot showed that the app was able to handle and validate digitised healthcare documents more than 1.5 million times, including COVID-19 discharge memos, swab outcomes, immunity evidence, and vaccination records.
For the pilot, the health passport app was introduced as a new feature in the Singapore Manpower Ministry’s FWMOMCARE app. The latter is a mobile application which was launched in May to help monitor and report migrant workers’ daily health status during the pandemic.
The digital health passport app has been built on the Open Attestation platform — an open-sourced framework for notarising documents using the blockchain, developed by the Singapore government’s CIO office, GovTech.
SGInnovate’s deputy director of venture building, Simon Gordn, has said that “as the pandemic tested Singapore’s healthcare sector, we identified a gap in the large-scale management of medical records.” “We wanted to quickly build a solution that enables a trusted authentication process,” he added.
In a joint statement, SGInnovate and Accredify have said that the app will remove reliance on paper-based documents, which can be lost or tampered with. SGInnovate explained “Digital Health Passport leverages blockchain technology to generate tamper-proof cryptographic protections for each medical document. Users can automatically verify the digital records via a mobile app and present it to officials via QR code, for a quick and seamless verification process.”
[image: Mike Enerio]
