COVID-19 Vaccination Record in Apple Wallet

I previously wrote about SafePass LA and briefly discussed why I prefer to store my COVID-19 vaccination record in Apple Wallet. In this post, I’d like to show you how you can get your COVID-19 vaccination record into Apple Wallet. There are 2 methods that I know of.

Method 1: Healthvana

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health partnered with Healthvana in December of 2020 to provide digital vaccination records as discussed here. A couple weeks after I received my 2nd Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, I received a text message from Healthvana. It contained a URL that allowed me to view a digital record of my vaccination:

After entering some information to confirm my identity, I was shown my COVID-19 vaccine record and presented with an option to add it to my Apple Wallet.

If you did not receive a text message or email from Healthvana, and if you received your COVID-19 vaccination in the county of Los Angeles, you can contact Healthvana and request your COVID-19 digital vaccination record. In the “What is your question about?” field, select “COVID-19 Vaccination” and complete the rest of the form. When I did this for my wife, she received a response later that same day.

Method 2: Vaccination QR Code

If you prefer not to use Healthvana, or if you did not receive your COVID-19 vaccination in the county of Los Angeles, there are other ways to get your COVID-19 vaccination record into Apple Wallet. All you need is a QR code of your vaccination record and an iPhone running iOS 15 or later (at the time of this writing, the current version is iOS 15.1.1).

Step 1 is to get a QR code of your vaccination record. There are at least 2 ways to get a QR code. The first is to retrieve it from your provider. For example, Kaiser Permanente has a portal where patients can login and retrieve immunization history and other parts of one’s medical record. This includes a QR code in SMART Health Card format.

If your provider does not provide a QR code to you, and if you live in the state of California, you can request your digital COVID-19 vaccine record at https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov. Simply enter your name, date of birth, your phone number or email, and a 4-digit PIN (any 4 numbers that you want, for the purpose of securely accessing your digital record). After submitting this information, you should soon receive  a text message or email with a link to retrieve your COVID-19 vaccine record which will contain a QR code.

Step 2 is to scan your QR code with your iPhone running iOS 15 or later. Simply launch your camera app and point your rear-facing camera at the QR code. Once your phone recognizes the QR code, it will display a “Health” notification:

Tapping the “Health” notification will take you to the Apple Health app with a prompt to add your COVID-19 vaccination record to Wallet and Health. Here’s what it looked like when I did this for my wife:

Step-by-step instructions, along with other options to add verifiable COVID-19 vaccination information to Apple Wallet and Health, are provided here. Learn more about Apple Wallet here.

COVID-19 Digital Health Credentials

If you’ve received one of the COVID-19 vaccines, you might have realized that there are many ways to prove that you have been vaccinated. First there is the physical “COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card” with the logos from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control at the upper right. Here’s mine:

If you received your shot at a location where you normally receive healthcare, you might also be able to access your immunization records through a patient portal. Here’s what mine looks like from a desktop-based web browser. Note that it unfortunately does not list the dates, and there was a data entry error because for my second shot, I asked that it be injected into my RIGHT arm.

In some cases, your local city or county may have partnered with a 3rd party health information technology company to provide you with a digital version of your vaccination record that can be added to a mobile wallet. Los Angeles County has partnered with Healthvana on this effort, and I received a text message that my vaccination record was available to be added to my mobile wallet. Here are screenshots from my iPhone to illustrate what it looks like to retrieve my vaccine information from a mobile web browser and what the record looks like in Apple Wallet:

As if there weren’t enough options, if you have an iPhone and a healthcare provider that supports interoperable patient data through a “Blue Button” download, you could transfer your vaccination information and other health records to your Apple Health app. Follow these instructions to add your health data to Apple Health. Here’s what my immunization record looks like in Apple Health, both in human-readable summary view as well as the underlying data:

There is much discussion about vaccine passports nowadays which has given rise to many questions. Can we do it? Should we do it? Is it even legal? Without getting into a lengthy debate, suffice it to say that technologies have already been around for many years, and we’ve already been implementing digital health credentials to varying degrees for quite some time. For me, adding data related to COVID-19 vaccination simply represents a more comprehensive picture of my overall health data.

In addition to the discussion about vaccine credentials or passports, perhaps a bigger challenge is to figure out whether we can all agree on a common method to share health data. There is a saying that goes something like this: “The great thing about health IT standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.”