The Ministry of Health will be launching a digital vaccination database system with QR code technology that will be accepted in many international countries such as the United Kingdom when vaccinated residents travel inbound to these destinations.
This was revealed by the Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ronald Georges during a recent COVID-19 panel discussion on social media, where he revealed the that the system will be launched next week.
He said the initiative was in the works for some time and will assist with alleviating some of the difficulties experienced by vaccinated travelers who leave the BVI and have vaccination verification issues in some countries.
Dr. Georges explained how this new system will work.
“We have done quite a bit of data testing on it and it’s basically ready for launch. We already have some information placed into the database already and we’ve worked with it and we’re very happy with how it works. So essentially persons can then go to this website – which is on the government server – and they can type their information, they upload the copies of the little vaccine cards front and back, they upload their ID and some other verification information and that goes into the database and were able to verify against whether they’ve been vaccinated or not against existing databases and generate automatically, once it has been approved, a vaccine verification letter and it has a QR code on it,” he explained.
“So anybody who gets that letter now can scan the QR code or if they uploaded in PDF, they can just click on the link and it’ll go straight back to the government website and verify if this person is indeed vaccinated. So that will satisfy the requirements for a number of countries to travel,” he added.
Plans to develop
The chief medical officer also revealed that there are plans to develop the database system to become compatible with the various mobile wallet applications to be of use for residents when travelling.
He said, “It’s been a lot of discussions about social media about those phones like Apple wallet and Samsung, you can get some wallets for your Samsung device and that letter, that QR code can easily then be, you can do it yourself, or we can talk to Department ID to have an application on the website to do it where you can then create a vaccine card which you can then put into your phone wallet.”
He added, “So we haven’t got to that stage yet. What we are ready to roll out beginning of next week is to launch the website. So you’ll be doing some promotions for us to launch the website to get information out there where persons can go in there, put in their information and then on the back end we’ll verify and once it’s been verified they will automatically get their vaccine verification letters.”
Dr. Georges had previously reported that there were instances where persons were found with falsified local vaccination cards.
He said this initiative through its verification process will assist with alleviating the forging of local vaccination cards.