SGInnovate, the government-owned investment firm, and Singaporean startup Accredify have jointly developed a new blockchain-powered digital health passport, as Singapore is turning to blockchain technology for the infrastructure that can make it work.
It has been reported that development work on the application, which allows personal medical data to be stored in a blockchain-secured digital wallet, began in May.
However, a successful pilot in July showed that the app was capable of managing and verifying digitized healthcare documents, including COVID-19 discharge memos, swab results, immunity proof, and vaccination records, more than 1.5 million times.
The report said that for the pilot, the health passport app was introduced as a new feature in the Singapore Manpower Ministry’s FWMOMCARE app, as the latter is a mobile application that was launched in May to help monitor and report migrant workers’ daily health status during the pandemic.
Singapore’s government-owned investment firm has developed a blockchain app for medical records that will support the safe reopening of the economy https://t.co/g9qELVZZuv — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) September 30, 2020
SGInnovate is funded by Singapore’s Ministry of Finance and has a track record of engagement with the blockchain space.
It has been analyzed that the digital health passport app has been built on the Open Attestation platform, an open-sourced framework for notarizing documents using the blockchain, developed by the Singapore government’s CIO office, GovTech.
Simon Gordn, the Deputy Director of Venture Building at SGInnovate, said:
“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.”
Moreover, 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.”
Thus, the company underscored the key advantages of blockchain technology in the field of healthcare data, in so far as it offers greater transparency, security and privacy for managing sensitive documents.
Source: Cointelegraph
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