The Digital Health Credential System Implementation Guide V1 is out!
As many of you may know, starting April 1, 2022, CCI became an independent Linux Foundation (LF) project operated separately from Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH). We joined LFPH in December 2020 to fight against COVID together and became a Joint Development Foundation (JDF)-chartered project (JDF is a part of LF) in June 2021 in order to have the proper legal structure to conduct rapid standardization of COVID credentials. Now that the COVID situation is eased, it is time for CCI to explore our next steps as an independent entity by building on our conversations and work in the past two years.
As we kicked off this new journey, many things will remain uncertain for a while. However, one thing is certain — we are committed to keeping CCI as an open and global community that welcomes diverse perspectives and constructive feedback. To that end, today we are releasing the Digital Health Credential System Implementation Guide V1 for public review and consumption and launching our community Discord to provide a forum for ongoing discussions and development of the Guide.
In 2021, CCI and our community members contributed significantly to the writing of the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint, which proposed a set of interoperability requirements and standards to verify travelers’ COVID-19 status in a way that ensures the protection of core principles, such as privacy, security, user-control, and equity. Inspired by the Blueprint, Erran Carmel, a business professor at the American University, reached out to Kaliya Young, CCI’s Ecosystems Director and the co-chair of the Good Health Pass Interoperability Working Group, and created the preliminary version of this Implementation Guide by summarizing the requirements in the Blueprint. At the invitation of Lucy Yang, CCI’s Community Director, Erran took this work into the CCI, and co-led it to fruition with Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, a long-time CCI community leader, with the contributions and support of the broader CCI community.
The Implementation Guide V1 provides a set of baseline recommendations to the CCI community of application and services developers, implementers with which to evaluate product designs. We believe that with more participation from our community we can refine this guide to reflect the state of the art — enabling a documentation of the best practices. We encourage users of this Guide to apply a critical lens and reach out to us with any issues and improvements we need to address for further versions.
As a follow-on activity to the release of the Guide, our Global Implementation Forum June event will host a presentation by two experts from gematik GmbH, the leading German healthcare organization, to share their “Insights from a Prototypical Implementation of Vaccinate Certificate” and relate their approach to the requirements in the Guide.
We invite you to join this upcoming event and our Discord to engage further on the Implementation Guide and discuss the future of CCI!
