Avenga, Accu Reference Medical Labs, and data protection specialist Ubirch have joined forces and built the first secured COVID-19 test result system. This will enable employees to show that they are not infected with COVID-19 and continue or go back to work.
“On the one hand, we all want to get back to the normal way of working as quickly as possible, but on the other hand we are seeing new outbreaks of COVID-19 every day, many of which could be prevented by consistent testing and the rapid transmission of the results. That’s why we came together with our partners – by all means, leaders in their respective fields of expertise – to develop a Security-first COVID-19 Test Result System, which allows a safe restart of the economy without the dangerous setbacks we have seen over and over again,” says Juan J. Turruellas, CEO North America at Avenga.
Stephan Noller, whose company provides the blockchain technology used in the solution, explains:
“There are not many blockchain applications in the healthcare environment yet, so we are all the more pleased that our development is used so beneficially.” What is more, the CEO of Ubirch emphasizes the fact that the Digital COVID-19 Health Certificate guarantees methodical and extensive protection of the data, based on his company’s technology and its decentralized user-friendly implementation.
“We have been contacted by several companies and authorities regarding the question, whether we would be able to deliver a solution like this.”, says Vladimir Roudik, Director of Marketing at Accu Reference Medical Lab, which has long been working on different methods of delivering tamper-proof test results to courts and law enforcement. He is convinced that the Secured COVID-19 Test Result System is a big step towards normal if just enough labs and companies started using it.
How it works
Since the labs that produce these results are not directly connected to the person, it is necessary to not only provide test results in a timely manner but also to secure them from alterations.
Now, labs can use a unique Secured Test Result System created by Avenga to register people, collect their data, get their test results, match them with a timestamp, and send them to a blockchain secured server in a hashed format.
Any step through this process that adds or changes information to the sample is anchored in the blockchain. The test results themselves are forwarded directly to the tested person via email in the form of a QR code.
That QR code can be presented, along with an ID, wherever required.
It allows for the verified medical status of a person to be anchored in a blockchain so that it can be delivered quickly from the lab to an app on people’s smartphones and presented in the form of a QR code, while at the same time being protected against any kind of alterations. The solution was presented to the public at ATA2020 and several companies are now exploring how to best incorporate it.
