CA Offers Residents Digital Record Storage for COVID-19 Vaccination

January 07, 2021 - Los Angeles County recently partnered with health startup, Healthvana, to roll out a new digital record offering that allows residents to store records of their COVID-19 vaccination in Apple Wallet or on a Google platform.

The offering will ensure individuals receive both doses of COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which were both approved for emergency use by the FDA. 

The digital record storage will also be able to verify that individuals have been vaccinated and store this information in Apple Wallet or a Google platform so they can prove to organizations, such as airlines or schools, that they have been properly vaccinated. 

Through the digital record offering, public health officials will provide patients ownership of their records, including a paper card tracking which vaccine they received and when. 

But one major challenge with a paper card is that it can be easily lost. Vaccination records must be stored in a more effective way and on a platform that is trustworthy for both patients and providers.

After Los Angeles County broke its record of new COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations in mid-December, Claire Jarashow, director of vaccine-preventable disease control at the county’s Department of Public Health, stated that it has been a race to distribute vaccines “as quickly as humanly possible.”

“We’re really concerned. We really want people to come back for that second dose,” Jarashow said. “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.”

To keep patient data information safe, Healthvana stores its data on Amazon Web Services’ HIPAA-compliant servers. Jarashow noted that she believes this approach is very safe and hopes this approach will ease any privacy concerns patients may have.  

Healthvana is also in discussions with large organizations, including concert venues, employers, universities, and schools, about applying this technology on a larger scale. But Ramin Bastani, chief executive officer at Healthvana believes it is “unlikely” that any one service will become “the standard.”

As of January 6, nearly 16 million doses of both Pfizer and Moderna’s respective COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in 37 countries.

Although the US rollout fell short of federal projections, the next phase will focus more on pharmacies, health clinics, and other places where vaccines are more traditionally administered. This approach may help to increase the number of individuals eligible for a vaccine. 

Both Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines were proven to be over 90 percent effective in clinical trials at the end of November. 

And similar to many other pharmaceutical companies in the vaccine race, both companies have developed distribution plans alongside drug development in order to get an approved vaccine into the hands of providers as soon as possible. 

For example, at the end of July, HHS and the DoD announced an agreement with Pfizer for large-scale production and nationwide delivery of 100 million doses of BNT162b2.

Under the agreement, the government will pay Pfizer and BioNTech $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses. The companies expect to produce up to 50 million vaccine doses globally in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. 

Then in mid-August, HHS and the Department of Defense (DoD) announced an agreement with Moderna for large-scale production and nationwide delivery of 100 million doses of mRNA-1273 in the US.

Specifically, the agreement includes fill-finish manufacturing in US-based facilities, which ensures vaccine doses are packaged and ready to ship immediately once a vaccine shows success in clinical trials. 

Most recently, Moderna released a COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing update for COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna, increasing its base-case global production estimate from 500 to 600 million doses for 2021. 

The company hopes to build that estimate to 1 billion doses by the end of 2021 based on continued investments and the addition of more staff.