How to Maximize COVID-19 Vaccination Data Coverage and Consumer Participation and make Health Passes Successful

By Lisa Orr, Senior Product Manager at Human API 

In this post, I share our latest data network intelligence and product findings related to COVID-19 vaccination data and health passes, against the current backdrop of the surging delta variant. Read on to learn how health passes can best maximize vaccination data coverage and consumer participation. 

With the COVID-19 delta variant surging and the inevitability of new variants in the future, it’s never been more important to drive up the vaccination rate, especially considering the high rates of hospitalizations and death among the unvaccinated.  

Employers are increasingly helping to drive the vaccination campaign by requiring employees to be vaccinated to return to the workplace. Some employers are going so far as issuing severe penalties to those who remain unvaccinated. And the case for mandates has been bolstered by recent news of the Pfizer vaccine being fully approved by the FDA.

As more stringent penalties grow for the remaining eligible yet unvaccinated cohort of the population, so too will COVID-19 vaccination credential fraud. Paper CDC cards are the most common form of vaccination verification today, and unfortunately can be easily faked. The black market for fraudulent CDC cards is on the rise, and it’s clear that checking CDC cards is not a tenable or reliable solution that our society can depend on. And although there are different ways to verify vaccination status, on a fundamental level, authenticated and digital verification of COVID-19 vaccinations using solutions such as health passes is the only reliable and scalable way to keep workplaces and public environments safe and effectively contain the delta variant (and future variants).

To support digital verification efforts, we’ve built a COVID-19 vaccine verification feature on top of our platform that ensures the authentication of a consumer’s vaccination status. As a product-led company that helps consumers access and share their health data, we spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience on our platform and how to optimize conversions in our nationwide data network. We’re actively learning and sharing our insights with customers that are building health pass solutions, to help make health pass solutions as successful as possible.  

Network Intelligence: What we’ve learned over the last 6 months

Digital health information screening and verification is a rapidly evolving landscape that the world is learning about together. Being an aggregator of nationwide data sources gives us the chance to learn where vaccine data is being stored today and how it can be best accessed.  

Over the last 6 months, consumers have connected COVID-19 vaccinations from over 800 distinct sources across our network. While we know there are major data sources with large numbers of vaccinations such as Walgreens, CVS and Kaiser Permanente, we learned these three big sources combined actually only covered 40% of all vaccinations while the other 60% of successful vaccination connections came from our nationwide network made up of smaller data sources and vaccine providers.  

With this in mind, we now know that if a health pass customer wanted to build out direct integrations with healthcare providers, they'd likely become overwhelmed with the number of data sources they need to integrate with in order to get adequate vaccination coverage. We currently provide 70% coverage for nationwide vaccination data, which we’ve found aligns well with prospective customer needs and goals. Taking into account regional and state variance, we’re confident that our network enables the best single point of access and coverage of vaccine data in the U.S. to power our new vaccine search experience which helps consumers find their providers and quickly connect their vaccination records.

Our recommendations for building successful health passes

The state of vaccination verification is changing very fast and can feel incredibly complex due to the interaction between different public, private, and individual forces. Add in the variance of how future strains of the virus will evolve, and it’s safe to say a lot of our response as a society and world as a whole will remain unpredictable. As a company, we’re learning and adapting as new information surfaces.  

Though the future remains uncertain in some aspects, there are still actions we can take to ensure the highest number of consumers can quickly and securely verify their vaccination status in a digital way. After talking to our customers and a lot of prospective folks who are trying to build health passes, we believe the most prevalent challenge is in being able to identify where the best data sources for vaccinations are to maximize coverage for users and provide the best path for people to authorize their vaccine data for verification. 

At Human API, we believe the best path forward is for health pass providers to integrate with a network aggregator such as ourselves. Integrating with a network (rather than building manual integrations) increases the probability of success for a consumer to successfully connect and find their vaccination data by allowing health pass providers to tap into “long tail” data sources, which are smaller data sources that in aggregate actually provide more coverage than the biggest data sources alone. 

Based on our network analysis, the largest data sources (such as national pharmacies and labs) with the highest volume of vaccinations don't provide as much coverage as all the smaller data sources combined. This learning reinforces our confidence that integrating with an aggregator network like Human API which provides access to high concentrations of smaller vaccine providers along with the biggest vaccine providers is much more effective than integrating with just the biggest sources. The network effect of connecting to a growing aggregator will also compound as new data sources keep getting added, informed by market and user research. 

Additionally, our platform will keep optimizing the user experience so more people can find their vaccination data faster, to support an effective long-term strategy for increasing conversions and the success of health passes over time. 

Current view into Human API’s data network coverage breakdown of top vaccine providers vs. the rest of the network. Our network currently provides a 70% coverage rate and is primed to increase as more data sources are added, user experience further optimized, and we learn from building with our health pass provider customers.

Prioritizing Security, Privacy, and Transparency to Increase Consumer Participation for Health Passes

Despite the dire need for us to be able to verify our population’s vaccination status, the desire to quickly build and scale health passes must be balanced with respecting consumer concerns related to security, privacy, and transparency. It’s more important than ever to design solutions that can maximize consumer participation, and building trust that someone’s data will be safe and secure is critical to improving and sustaining engagement of health passes.  

Digital health identity verification is an emerging concept that is beginning to take shape, as more health passes emerge and consumers get more used to sharing their health data digitally. As companies, we have a responsibility to feed this momentum by taking all the steps to make sure consumers feel secure when using our products to share data. This is why we will never share a consumer’s data without their explicit consent. We believe building trust is critical to long-term success of our platform to enable health data transactions that provide value for individuals and society. We were designed to be consumer-driven, and the pandemic has only made our mission more important.  

To learn more about how we’re powering health passes, get in touch with us. Check out our new vaccine search experience and see how easy it is for consumers to find and connect their vaccination records.   

Have any questions or comments? Reach out to me at lisa@humanapi.co. I’m actively talking to consumers, business owners, health pass providers, pharmacies, and labs, and would love to hear from you.