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next-upnext upauthorJanko RoettgersNoneDo you know what's coming next up in the world of tech and entertainment? Get Janko Roettgers' newsletter every Thursday.9147dfd6b1
February 22, 2021
The streaming service plans to expand to new markets that will allow the company to target a billion new potential customers in the coming days. Spotify announced its international expansion plans at a "Stream On" virtual press event Monday that also included a few product updates, including a preview on a high-definition streaming tier that is slated to launch in the coming months.
Spotify has yet to announce pricing and other details for this new subscription tier. The company did use Monday's event to also announce its take on the popular stories format, which the company calls Clips. Finally, CEO Daniel Ek said that the company ended 2020 with 8 million creators; he said that Spotify could have as many as 50 million creators on its platform by 2025.
Update: This story was updated to reflect that South Korea is not part of the new expansion plans. Spotify launched in South Korea on Feb. 1.
Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
Transforming 2021
Truveta’s plan to make health AI that actually works
Former Microsoft executive Terry Myerson's new health data venture aims to apply big data to patient care with "an alliance of health systems."
Former Windows chief Terry Myerson on the move to AI in medicine.
Photo: Truveta
February 26, 2021
Kevin McAllister ( @k__mcallister) is an associate editor at Protocol, leading the development of Braintrust. Prior to joining the team, he was a rankings data reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw structured data projects for the Journal's strategy team.
February 26, 2021
If health AI were a patient at a hospital, its chart up to this point wouldn't look too promising.
Its symptoms are long-standing and chronic: a lack of interoperability, a dearth of equitable data sets and a difficult-to-navigate relationship with patient privacy. And the specialists that have taken a crack at treating it — Big Tech, insurance giants, AI and cloud companies — have largely come up short with patient-care tools that have broad utility across the medical field.
<p>But Terry Myerson, the CEO of the newly-announced collaborative health data venture Truveta, said he believes the prognosis could be starting to turn the corner.</p><p>The former head of Windows at Microsoft, Myerson has assembled a team meshing Silicon Valley talent and health care expertise that, from the get-go, is approaching health data from a unique angle. Like its <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/major-hospital-systems-plan-to-share-anonymous-data-on-millions-of-patients-through-seattle-startup/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">funding</a>, Truveta's data will be sourced from 14 health care systems that span the country and account for <a href="https://truveta.com/newsroom/leading-health-providers-unite-to-advance-patient-care-by-forming-truveta" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tens of millions</a> of patients. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>With the scale and diversity of the data, along with buy-in from providers, Myerson sees Truveta as being in a unique position to use AI to structure the data and build a database that has clinical and research value, all while protecting the privacy of patients by relying on the ethics and governance procedures already built into the health networks' policies.</p><p>"The most important thing to all the health systems that are in this really has come down to governance," Myerson said. "This is their patient's data. They don't want this to be used for marketing drugs to sell the wrong drug to the wrong patient."</p><p>In an interview with Protocol, Myerson explained Truveta's new approach to data collection and analysis in medicine, how his company addresses algorithmic bias, how they're protecting privacy in the data and creating "an alliance of health systems."</p><p><em>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</em></p><p><strong>You've already managed a feat in bringing together 14 somewhat unlikely partners with Truveta. How did the company come to be?</strong></p><p>How far back do you want to go? I was pre-med in college, but then fell in love with computers and ended up pursuing a career that was in computer software. In 1994, I remember I was actually working in the Washington, D.C. area, working with the National Institutes of Health on scientific visualization. I got exposure to the internet for the first time, fell in love, started a company to do internet work and then in 1997, Microsoft acquired that company. I thought I was going to stay a couple of weeks, but ended up staying 21 and a half years. When I left in 2018, I joined a local venture capital firm named Madrona Venture Group, which gave me the opportunity to really rekindle this interest and became absolutely fascinated in the intersection of data sciences and life sciences.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>I saw just so much opportunity for innovation to bring computing and bring big data techniques to everything: to discovery of new biomarkers, the design of proteins, the diagnosis of diseases, reading X-rays. But there was this common trend in all of this big data work — nobody really had access to good data.</p><p><strong>How did the pandemic play into it?</strong></p><p>One of my old colleagues from Microsoft had become the chief information officer at Providence [one of the health systems working with Truveta] and said, "Hey Terry, I know you're super interested in this space. There's this little virus floating around. Why don't you come down and help us out and be part of the virtual team?" It was eye-opening to me. I saw that they were not able to ask and answer some really fundamental questions: Who should be intubated? How long should they be intubated for? The questions just went on and on, and the data was just not organized in a way for them to ask and answer those super important questions.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>I watched health systems working so hard to provide data to regulatory authorities to create all these dashboards. Every city, state, county, federal agency, everyone was now creating a [coronavirus] dashboard, and they were all competing for the coolest controls and needing new data sets to come out for these. And there was this question for me. We've got all of these great COVID dashboards. My dad died of Crohn's disease, colon cancer; where's the dashboard on that? I had ACL surgery; where's the dashboard on that? My wife's best friend just had breast cancer; where's the dashboard on that? And the answer was, well, there isn't one.<br></p><p>That's when I learned about this project called Truveta, which the Providence team had actually written white papers on back in 2018 [saying] we need to build a national data alliance of health systems. We need to put our data together so we can learn about it at scale and govern the ethics of this data so that it's all used for the benefits of patients. And I'm like, "This is a really good idea. We should make this thing real."</p><p><strong>You're talking about a ton of data, some of it surely structured better than others. What does the process of getting it to something workable in a clinical or research environment entail from a data science perspective?</strong></p><p>We're actually quite fortunate. The academic community has done some amazing work to structure and model human health. It's not used in the production [electronic health record] systems today, but if you look at SNOMED or LOINC or RxNorm, just three very common ontologies you find broadly used in academia, there's some really great work out there to build a model for health concepts. And we're going to build off that amazing work.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>I feel like we're standing on the shoulders of giants in the academic community that have done brilliant work, sometimes decades of brilliant work, to try and model human health and the relationships between health concepts. And we get to apply that work.</p><p><strong>Apply it how?</strong></p><p>In that case, I was talking about bringing structure to all of this unstructured data. And it has two purposes: One, it enables it all to be brought together in one normalized sense. But really you want to query it. If you want to look for people with certain side effects, certain outcomes, certain cohorts of a disease, you're going to be querying on these concepts.</p><p>We're not the first ones to try to model cancer. We want to build off the work in the academic community to model cancer. And our team consists of ex-Amazon, ex-Google, ex-Microsoft, ex-Facebook [people] and a bunch of clinically-trained people. We're this beautiful blend of clinical training and technology, but we're bringing all the hard work we learned trying to build global scale unstructured data systems to this new domain. We're this interesting hybrid of big tech and big medicine.</p><p><strong>Health equity was a big part of your <a href="https://truveta.com/blog/creating-truveta-to-save-lives-with-data" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">launch announcement</a>. Health AI in the past has been the subject of criticism about algorithmic bias as it relates to gender, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. What's your plan to combat bias in the models you're building?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>I think there's two things. First is just transparency. Truveta is being very transparent about where the data comes from, and we're going to be transparent about the demographics of any given data set anyone's doing work with and of the covariance of that data set versus the population. You'll know going in what the population you're reasoning against is, relative to the population.</p><p>Most of the data sets out there today are completely opaque as to where the data came from and the population inside the data set. To me, not only does that put unknown bias in, it fundamentally lacks scientific integrity. That transparency hopefully builds trust and helps us make reasoned decisions about whether we are unintentionally creating any bias by putting a data set in that's not demographically representative.</p><p>The second thing is we have scale. If you're going to create a data set to reason against, you want it to be statistically representative of the population, but unless that data set has scale, you can't finely cohort on it. Say I'm looking for people that have COVID and epilepsy. You better have enough data, such that when you look at that specific population, it can still be representative. That combination of scale and transparency about where the data comes from and the demographic population of it will shine a light on what we're reasoning against, what we're making policy decisions against, what we're creating algorithms for.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>There was <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/03/fda-clearances-artificial-intelligence-data/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">an article in STAT</a> a couple of weeks ago about how all of these medicines have been approved with data sets where you don't know where they're from and don't know what populations are represented in them. And these are things that have been FDA-approved or CMS reimbursement-approved. To be fair, it may not be the fault of the innovator that they use those data sets because that's all they have today. But the inability to share information about the data and where it came from is undoubtedly creating unintended biases in these tools. With Truveta, we hope to move past that, where data sets can be reproduced, populations are representative and we have full transparency as to who we're reasoning about. It doesn't solve inequities, but I think it moves us really down the field in terms of having a better foundation to think through them.</p><p><strong>The flip side of transparency is privacy. You're dealing with a public that's generally uneasy about public health data, to the point that what we saw play out with <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-s-secret-project-nightingale-gathers-personal-health-data-on-millions-of-americans-11573496790" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google and Ascension</a> last year opened up new questions about that line between what's legal and what's publicly accepted. With that in mind, how does privacy play into Truveta's product design?</strong></p><p>It's something where we need to keep learning. When you do something new, you're always going to have new things to learn. Foundationally, because we're health system-led, everything we're doing is compliant with all state and federal regulations for health policy rules. And there are a number of health data organizations out there that are not HIPAA compliant, but we are. In everything we're doing, from notifying patients through de-identification, being HIPAA compliant is top of mind.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Then, there is this notion of this being the patient's data, and we've got to reason about that and do the right thing. We're continuously thinking about what the right way to inform patients is. We're thinking about the greater good, and we recognize that trust with patients is paramount to all of our partners and, having done new things before, we're going to learn and continuously improve.</p><p><strong>Looking ahead, what's the roadmap look like for the rest of the year for the company, and what part has you most excited?</strong></p><p>We hope to bring up the platform this year. Calendar 2021 is our year of building and bringing this thing to life. Most of our team are actually engineers — we've got a whole lot of people building this platform to try and bring it to life.</p><p>And I just feel like we're going to shine the light on so many new things that just haven't been seen before. It's exciting to work on something that could have such a big impact on humanity, on the people I care about in my life. You just don't get the opportunity very often. When I worked on Windows, I thought this is impacting a billion people around the world, but this, at least to me, has become so much more meaningful when I think about what we could do. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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Kevin McAllister ( @k__mcallister) is an associate editor at Protocol, leading the development of Braintrust. Prior to joining the team, he was a rankings data reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw structured data projects for the Journal's strategy team.
Sponsored Content
Building better relationships in the age of all-remote work
How Stripe, Xero and ModSquad work with external partners and customers in Slack channels to build stronger, lasting relationships.
Image: Original by Damian Zaleski
February 21, 2021
February 8, 2021
Every business leader knows you can learn the most about your customers and partners by meeting them face-to-face. But in the wake of Covid-19, the kinds of conversations that were taking place over coffee, meals and in company halls are now relegated to video conferences—which can be less effective for nurturing relationships—and email.
Email inboxes, with hard-to-search threads and siloed messages, not only slow down communication but are also an easy target for scammers. Earlier this year, Google reported more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19 scams in just one week and more than 240 million daily spam messages.
<p>To keep the lines of communication wide open in this new reality, organizations are adopting new cloud solutions at a rate CIOs expected to see years from now. In fact, 79% of CIOs agree that the pandemic will force their organizations to digitally transform faster than planned, according to <a href="https://slack.com/blog/transformation/people-partners-systems-slack" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">J.P. Morgan</a>. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>But executive leaders know it takes more than just adopting a communication platform or software bundle to build relationships remotely. You have to find the <em>right</em> solution that meets both your internal and external collaboration needs. That's why competitive businesses today are turning to Slack, the <a href="https://slack.com/features/channels" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">channel-based messaging platform, </a>to close communication gaps with partners and customers in the age of remote work. Companies can securely collaborate with external parties using <a href="https://slack.com/help/articles/360017938993-What-is-a-channel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Slack channels</a>, a single place to share files and messages, in the same <a href="https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/setting-up-a-shared-channel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Slack workspace</a> through <a href="http://slack.com/connect" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Slack Connect</a>.</p><p>With Slack Connect, organizations can build stronger customer and partner relationships through real-time communication. And unlike email—which leaves users open to the risk of spam and phishing—companies and external parties receive communications only from <a href="https://slackhq.com/introducing-new-layers-of-enterprise-grade-security" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">verified members in Slack channels</a>. Plus, Slack workspace administrators can maintain control over data and monitor external access. </p><p>Here's a closer look at how teams at Stripe, Xero and ModSquad are using Slack Connect to engage customers, prospects and partners in real-time and close deals faster. </p><h4>Stripe: Expediting sales deals while building lasting relationships with customers</h4><p><a href="https://stripe.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stripe</a> is an online payment provider with a mission to support e-commerce. The Stripe sales team works with early-stage startups all the way through global Fortune 500 companies, and uses Slack Connect to engage with customers, keep communication organized and teams in sync, and jump on sales opportunities.</p><p>Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, head of Americas revenue and growth at Stripe, says communicating with prospective customers in Slack has been instrumental in maintaining engagement and closing deals.</p><p class="pull-quote">"Historically, the gold standard of a deep relationship in sales was getting the person on text," says DeWitt Grosser. "Now the gold standard is getting them into a Slack channel."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Usually at the beginning of a sale, DeWitt Grosser explains, reps used to double down on communication using the "law of 2x." Essentially, you start with a meeting and then follow up a week later. But this strategy no longer makes the cut: A lot could change in a week, and Slack is more in line with the tempo of the digital workplace. </p><p>"In Slack channels, the dialogue with the prospect happens in real time, as opposed to the next time you align your schedules," DeWitt Grosser says. "This kind of personal, persistent connection grows customer loyalty and retention."</p><p>Often sales reps have to communicate with a variety of departments to seal the deal. Instead of emailing them separately and creating silos, Stripe's account executives and solution architects set up a Slack channel with key customer stakeholders, like developers, the head of payments and a finance representative. </p><p>"When you need to move quickly, email is not the right format: It's more formal and responses take longer," says James Dyett, Stripe's head of global product sales and payments optimizations. "Slack has super powers. It's a much better experience." </p><h4>Xero: Working with external partners like they're on the same team</h4><p>If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it's that relationships matter. Whether it's launching a marketing campaign with a partner or hiring contractors to complete a specific project, we can't—and shouldn't—try to do everything ourselves. <br><br>When it comes to nurturing partnerships in the midst of the pandemic, <a href="https://www.xero.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Xero</a>, a cloud-based accounting software company, affirms that working in Slack Connect has been a game changer. Justine Wallendorf, New Zealand partner marketing manager at Xero, says Slack Connect helped her team launch a joint online marketing campaign with partners, <a href="https://www.figured.com/en-us/figured-xero" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Figured</a> and <a href="http://paysauce" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Paysauce</a>. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The three companies were offering a complete software solution for farmers looking to manage their business digitally. By coming together in one Slack channel, #xero-partners, the sales and marketing teams across all three businesses could connect and ensure alignment on: </p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Immediate universal access to all campaign details</li><li>Consistent messaging across sales enablement deliverables, such as one pagers and slide decks</li><li>Quick feedback and turnaround times for deliverables</li><li>Clear leadership signoffs</li></ul><p class="pull-quote">"Working in Slack Connect guaranteed that everyone was beating the same drum and speaking the same language, positioning our partnership as best as possible in the market," Wallendorf says.</p><h4>ModSquad: Winning customer loyalty with exceptional customer support</h4><p>With so much uncertainty in the world, efficient and reliable customer support is akin to a safe harbor in a storm. That's why Slack customer, <a href="https://modsquad.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ModSquad</a> has its support teams troubleshoot customer issues in real time with Slack Connect.</p><p>As a customer experience outsourcer, ModSquad knows good customer service. Each day, ModSquad's global crew of experts—the Mods—help their customers engage with their audiences online through customer support, content moderation, community management and social media. </p><p>ModSquad works with its clients in Slack Connect to set up service level agreements and incorporate support dashboards. With the <a href="https://slack.com/apps/A0108APQFQC-geckoboard" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Geckoboard Slack integration</a>, ModSquad monitors clients' incoming calls and chats—without ever leaving Slack. Whenever the team sees an uptick in activity or service impacting issues, they can quickly alert clients and internal teams for quick resolution. The team also relies on a <a href="https://slack.com/apps/A9WFQ3M0B-zendesk" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Zendesk Slack integration</a> to track service desk tickets, troubleshoot and resolve issues.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>According to Steve Henry, senior vice president, client services at ModSquad, Slack channels also help build a culture of transparent communication and trust with clients.</p><p>"Establishing trust with our clients is very important, and Slack provides a crucial component for all of our efforts" Henry says. "With Slack, we can provide world-class support solutions and improvements for our clients, driving efficiencies while growing their business in the process."</p><h4>In an all-remote world, Slack Connect builds strong partnerships</h4><p>Slack Connect is available for <a href="https://slack.com/pricing/paid-vs-free" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">all paid plans</a>. If you're already a customer but new to Slack Connect, feel free to <a href="http://slack.com/contact" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reach out</a> or learn more on <a href="https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/setting-up-a-shared-channel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">how to get started</a>. And if you want to see how others are using Slack Connect to work with external partners, check out a few of our recent <a href="https://slack.com/blog/collections/slack-connect-shared-channels-shared-success" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">customer stories</a>. </p>
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Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
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