Linux Foundation Public Health introduces the Global COVID Certificate Network to operationalize the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint
June 10, 2021, Geneva Switzerland: After more than a year of pandemic restrictions, resulting in a greater than 70% decline in travel and tourism activity, health status exchange will enable economies and borders to reopen. On February 9th, 2021, the Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC) was launched to build an interoperable bridge blueprint to accommodate varying standards-based health credential formats, driven by disparate governing authorities to serve the complex travel industry.
To implement a subset of its recommendations, on June 8th, 2021, Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) announced the facilitation of the Global COVID Certificate Network (GCCN), a network of expert collaborators to facilitate trust building and interoperable exchange of COVID certificates for safe reopening of borders globally by operationalizing the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint.
“The first wave of apps for proving one’s COVID status did not allow that proof to be shown beyond a single state or nation, did not avoid vendor lock-in, and did not distinguish between rich health data and simple passes. The Blueprint gives this industry a way to solve those issues while meeting a high bar for privacy and integrity, and GCCN turns those plans into action.”
Brian Behlendorf, General Manager for Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity at the Linux Foundation
Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC) Releases Draft Blueprint for Digital Health Passes in Advance of G7 Summit
[Official GHPC press release here]
As a global multi-sector initiative to establish guiding principles for digital health passes while streamlining the standards development process, GHPC grew from 25 partners to more than 125 companies and organizations from across the health, travel, and technology sectors within weeks.
Initiated by leaders from the ID2020 Alliance, a collaborative effort was launched to produce the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint. The Blueprint addresses – in considerable depth and detail – nine technical and interoperability challenges around which global consensus must be reached:
Consistent User Experience
Security, Privacy, and Data Protection
Identity Binding
Standard Data Models and Elements
Credential Formats, Signatures, and Protocols
Paper Credentials
Rules Engines
Trust Registries
Governance and Trust Frameworks
The nine drafting groups brought together more than 120 experts from the health, travel, and technology sectors, managed through a partnership with the Trust Over IP Foundation – a Linux Foundation project.
On June 7th, 2021, GHPC announced the release of their eagerly-anticipated Blueprint in draft form [download here] for three weeks of stakeholder consultations and public comments. The primary intention of the announcement was to stimulate discussion at the G7 Summit, which opens on Friday, June 11th, in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, UK.
Paul Knowles, Head of the Advisory Council at the Human Colossus Foundation, co-led the Standard Data Models and Elements drafting group, one of the nine interconnected GHPC drafting groups, to spearhead group recommendations on data elements, common models for data exchange, and data harmonisation. The recommendations of that drafting group will help to enable semantic interoperability without putting any undue burden on existing health systems and workflows.
Key recommendations from the Standard Data Models and Elements drafting group include:
Data elements. The drafting group specified standard data elements for three COVID-19 credentials —vaccination, test, and recovery— based on the European Commission’s eHealth Network recommendations. The group also defined data elements for a standard travel pass consisting of name, date of birth, and an event-specific status indicator;
A common model for data exchange. To standardize and facilitate the exchange, sharing, and storing of data from multiple sources, the drafting group specified HL7 FHIR (release 4) as a common data model for COVID-19 credentialing initiatives to promote interoperability between systems that encode healthcare data in different ways.; and
Data harmonization. The final group recommendation was Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA) as a solution for data harmonization between data models and data representation formats, devised explicitly for semantic interoperability, acting as a catalyst for standardized credential issuance in multiple languages.
“Digital health passes offer our best hope to safely, confidently, and promptly restore global travel and restart the global economy – but only if they are widely trusted and adopted by the public and universally accepted by airlines and border control agencies. The standards proposed in the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint will make it possible for digital health pass systems around the world to be interoperable with one another, thus creating a trusted, convenient, and seamless experience for travellers as well as for airlines, airports, and border control agencies.”
Dakota Gruener, Executive Director, ID2020
“To allow international travel to resume safely, we must take every possible step to limit the spread of new Covid-19 variants. We urgently need an internationally-recognised system of health passes so that travellers can quickly and easily prove their health status, in a way that is secure and privacy-preserving. The Good Health Pass Collaborative is doing critical work to develop the standards we need to support this. Now political leaders need to lend their weight to this effort. The G7 group of nations should commit to establish a network of globally interoperable health passes, and set up the necessary working groups to deliver it.”
Tony Blair, Executive Chairman of Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Former UK Prime Minister
Linux Foundation Public Health creates the Global COVID Certificate Network (GCCN)
[Official LFPH press release here | Official LFPH blog post here]
To implement a subset of its recommendations, on June 8th, 2021, LFPH announced the launch of GCCN, a network of expert collaborators to provide technical implementation guidance to operationalize the Blueprint. GCCN will include a global directory of trust registries to enable cross-border certificate verification, and be a home for toolkits and community-managed support for those building and managing COVID certificate systems. This next phase of implementation will help governments and public health authorities (PHAs) to build interoperable solutions respecting privacy with the aim to reopen international borders.
GCCN will implement a technological framework in a bid to enable citizens to move safely and freely across borders during the global COVID pandemic. The defined infrastructure hopes to allow interoperable and trustworthy exchanges of COVID certificates between countries for safe travel.
To knit together all of the necessary components and gain sufficient momentum behind the launch of GCCN, the network partners have focused on alignment with the EU Member States and other key organizations implementing COVID systems for governments and industry alliances.
“We are interested to learn about how LFPH is taking bold steps in creating the Global COVID Certificate Network in order to facilitate trust building and interoperability for safe borders reopening, since it still seems that there are many challenges and barriers to overcome, for example the need for a European eID agreement. The Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel of the European Parliament (EP) is looking into the challenges that the pandemic has introduced, and also we explore potential technological solutions and their impact based on scientific data, credible sources of information and the respect of the European values. I look forward to the next steps of the LFPH that could provide us with more ideas and insights on strategies that enhance the use of a certificate in a safe way, and also to provide further technical options for the EU that could be adopted and could help and enable our system to work in a harmonised way. As soon as we achieve that, then we could immediately share the methodology to connect with the rest of the world and move to the new normal of our post COVID digital era, always in respect of the European charter for human rights and the regulation for privacy and personal data.”
Eva Kaili, MEP and Chair of the STOA Panel of the European Parliament
In this collaborative effort, The Human Colossus Foundation brings its expertise in the domain of decentralized semantics. With the aim to help jurisdictional (and sectoral) governance authorities to reopen international borders while respecting citizen privacy rights, we will continue to offer consultancy and implementation guidance on decentralized technologies across the Structure, Causality, Knowledge, and Intelligence domains.
“A key consideration for international travel requirements is to enable the resolution of digital credentials in multiple languages. The Human Colossus Foundation will contribute to the Global COVID Certificate Network in the development of a transformation pipeline to enable data harmonization between the recommended HL7 FHIR (release 4) data model for data exchange and the implementation of OCA where linguistic overlays can support multi-language credentialing following the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0 standard."
Paul Knowles, Head of the Advisory Council, Human Colossus Foundation
GCCN has gained the initial support of government and industry implementation partners and technology experts that have committed to developing and moving the initiative forward.
