Frequently Asked Questions

The Good Health Pass Collaborative is an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative to establish principles and standards for interoperable digital health passes aimed at restoring international travel and restarting the global economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the travel and tourism industry – and the economies of many tourism-dependent countries – to the brink of collapse. In 2020 alone, more than 62 million people – mostly low and middle-income workers – lost their livelihoods as the sector contracted by 49.1 percent (US$ 4.5 trillion). 

Even under the best of circumstances, developing technology standards can take years – or even decades. To streamline the process, ID2020 launched the Good Health Pass Collaborative in February 2021. Since then, the Collaborative has brought together more than 125 global companies and organizations from across the health, travel, and technology sectors to support this important work.  

Globally interoperable, universally-accepted, digital health passes – built to a common open standard – are an urgently-needed and essential step toward restoring international travel and restarting the global economy. 

The Good Health Pass Collaborative came together to tackle the challenge. 

Privacy & Data Security

Good health pass solutions must be designed and implemented to enhance privacy, support data minimization and auditability, and be compliant with relevant data privacy regulations. Solutions should not contribute to the creation of new centralized data stores of sensitive personal information.

User Control

Good health pass solutions must allow individuals to own and control their health and identity credentials. They must provide transparency over how user data is collected, used, and shared. Individuals must be able to determine where, when, with whom, and for what purposes their data is shared.

Choice & Consent

Use of a good health pass should be voluntary and consent-based. Those who do wish to use one should have a choice between a range of available solutions and using them on a mobile device, a secure physical form (e.g., a QR code, etc.), or both.

Trust

Good health pass solutions must be trusted. They must be designed, implemented, and operated to the highest standards for privacy, security, integrity, and transparency. Trust frameworks that govern these relationships are required and should incorporate input from public and private sector stakeholders, including – to the extent feasible – civil society organizations that focus on equity and digital privacy.

Inclusivity

Good health pass solutions must be designed to equitably serve everyone, including those who may be identity, socially, financially, digitally, or otherwise excluded. Alternative mechanisms should be available that offer a similar level of verifiability (e.g., paper).

Open Standards

Solutions must adhere to broadly accepted open standards and be built upon open technology to contribute to transparency, compatibility, interoperability, and extensibility across the ecosystem and to prevent vendor lock-in.

Interoperability

Good health pass solutions must be interoperable across institutional, sectoral, and geographic boundaries.

Extensibility

Principles and standards developed for good health pass solutions to address the various complexities of international travel will be readily adaptable – and extensible – to other use cases for COVID-19 pandemic recovery and for seamless travel.

Social Responsibility

Good health pass solutions address a variety of social and economic issues that impact everyone. These efforts should align with the principles outlined in the UN Global Compact for corporate social responsibility.

No. The Good Health Pass Collaborative is neither developing its own digital health pass product nor endorsing any specific technology solution or service provider. 

Rather, the Collaborative has brought together a broad-based “coalition of the willing” made up of companies and organizations from the health, travel, and technology sectors – including all of the major private sector solution providers – to establish principles and open standards for digital health passes.

When we talk about digital health pass systems that are “good”, we mean that they align with the Good Health Pass Collaborative Principles and have been designed to be privacy protecting, user-controlled, interoperable, equitable, and widely accepted for international travel, and more.

Since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, countless public and private sector initiatives have sought to address various aspects of this incredibly complex challenge. 

The Good Health Pass Collaborative was never intended to supplant these efforts, but rather to weave together outstanding work already underway, identify and fill gaps where they may exist, and facilitate collaboration among a new ecosystem of stakeholders, many of whom had never worked together before. 

Given the diverse range of affected stakeholder, achieving global interoperability and universal-recognition of digital health passes will require unprecedented collaboration between the public and private sectors. The Good Health Pass Collaborative and its partners stand ready to support international efforts to enable global interoperability among digital health passes.

Proof of an individual’s COVID-19 status is already required as a precondition of international travel. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

“Digital”, in this context, refers to the means of verification, not the form factor.

Digital health passes will enable travelers to easily and conveniently provide airlines and border control agencies with verifiable proof of their COVID status. They can be carried on an individuals’ mobile phone or in a paper or card-based format (e.g., a printed QR code) that supports a similar level of verifiability.

The Good Health Pass Collaborative has always insisted that there must be alternatives to mobile phone-based applications in order to ensure that those who do not have – or wish to use – a mobile phone are not systematically excluded. 

As governments around the world continue to debate the range of contexts in which individuals should be required to provide proof of their COVID status, clear guidance and proactive policies are urgently needed to protect equity and inclusion, privacy, fundamental human rights, and other civil liberties. 

While the Good Health Pass Collaborative has focused exclusively on their application for international travel, the Good Health Pass Principles and Blueprint can offer valuable guidance for policymakers as they consider whether – and/or how – they should be used in other contexts.

No. Privacy by Design is a fundamental principle of the Good Health Pass standards. This means that a digital health pass compatible with these standards must not enable the user to be tracked any more than if they had used a paper credential. 

The standards outlined in the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint ensure that verifiers do not “phone home” to verify an individual’s COVID status, thus creating breadcrumbs, which would allow governments or corporations to track their movements.

Cross border travel presents one of the most complex use cases for digital health passes, requiring extensive collaboration across multiple sectors and jurisdictions. No single company, industry, or government can possibly address it alone.

All the stakeholders involved – healthcare delivery organizations, testing labs, airlines, passengers, governments – should be able to choose the implementation that best meets their needs and industry should be able to compete to offer the best solutions.

But with choice comes the need for interoperability. This can only be achieved through a set of open standards to which all digital health credential systems adhere. The alternative – fragmentation – presents a significant risk of  undermining acceptance, adoption, and ultimately, the utility of digital health credential systems.

The term “verifiable credential” is taken from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard of the same name. It is the term they used for the digital version of a paper credential, such as those we carry around in our wallet or purse (passport, driving license, health insurance card, employee ID, etc.)

What makes it “verifiable” is that the digital credential is digitally signed by the issuer such that any verifier (a party who needs to see a proof of the credential) can verify the cryptographic signature to ensure that it could only have come from the issuer and that it has not been tampered with.

In order for verifiable credentials to interoperate at an international scale, however, additional standards beyond the W3C verifiable credential standards are needed, such as accreditation of the COVID-19 testing labs or vaccinators issuing the credentials, certification that digital wallet apps are secure and private, proof of how the credential is bound to the identity of the holder, and agreement on the QR codes to be used to request a digital health pass. The Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint – in its considerable depth and breadth – addresses these issues and more.

You can view the entire list of endorsing organizations here.

The Good Health Pass Collaborative is working to restore international travel, while empowering individuals with privacy-protecting digital health passes. This will require a team effort.

Participation in the Collaborative is open to companies, organizations that share our commitment to restoring international travel while simultaneously ensuring that equity, privacy, and other civil liberties are protected. The principles that drive our work are outlined in our foundational white paper, Good Health Pass: A Safe Path to Global Reopening.

Our governance model is designed to reflect our commitment to inclusivity, transparency, and collaboration, and ensure that no single sector or institution dominates the conversation or monopolizes the activities and outputs of the Collaborative. We believe that our collective impact can only be maximized through cooperation across sectors – including between commercial competitors.

Our tiered model is intended to ensure that partnering organizations can contribute at a level appropriate to their interest, expertise, and capabilities.

For more information about joining the Good Health Pass Collaborative or to be listed as an endorser, please click here for details.

The process of developing technology standards typically takes months or even years – especially for something as immensely complex as globally interoperable digital health passes. Drafting the standards is just the beginning; promoting their adoption and implementation is an ongoing process.  

Following the publication of the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint in August, participating companies and organizations are working together to:

• Advocate for adoption of the Blueprint;
• Establish a program for the certification of Good Health Pass-compliant solutions; 
• Update the Blueprint, as circumstances dictate;
• Collaborate with governments and civil society organizations to educate the public about how they can safely and securely share proof of their COVID status; 
• Aggregate and share data on the adoption of Good Health Pass-compliant solutions;  and 
• Serve as the governing authority for the Good Health Pass Ecosystem Governance Framework. 

For more information about joining the Good Health Pass Collaborative or to be listed as an endorser, please click here for details.

Please complete this form to join the Good Health Pass Collaborative.