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May 6, 2020
Canadian Health Tech and Digital Identity Communities Come Together to Help
These community initiatives come at a time when lack of overdue digital transformation has been highlighted due to the impacts of the coronavirus. At the heart of this transformation remains a challenge to access real-time, protected data and digital health services.
As various government officials, privacy experts and health networks consider the lasting effects of the coronavirus pandemic on infrastructure, the economy and population health, and weigh them against solutions and their tradeoffs, the need for citizen privacy and the limited availability of technology designed to respect individuals’ consent and data privacy has become evident.
With many point solutions popping up everywhere, and the challenges with data sharing between regions—especially as we move from crisis to recovery—it's important that the community converge on scalable and real solutions. One way to do that is through open source contributions where the best of everyone’s experiences can ensure a solution that adequately straddles federal, provincial and public health region roles in managing this pandemic. Once made available, the tech community and health authorities can access and test the viability of these solutions to meet immediate needs.
The open source contact tracing mobile application initiated by IDENTOS was built with consent and built-in privacy at the core. It uses Bluetooth to privately and anonymously track encounters between users of the app. It enables consent for users to share their encounter history with health authorities should they become infected so that parties can be notified when they have been at risk, without ever knowing which encounter led to risk, and doesn’t provide means for the monetization of data. It is available for anyone to pick up, test and evolve at no cost.
IDENTOS invites the community and anyone interested in curbing the pandemic to utilize their open source software and is calling on all innovators to join their Developer hub.
Learn more about the contact tracing project and join the Developer hub: https://identos.com/contact-tracing/
The mobile Health Navigator by IDENTOS supports rapid digitization for health networks, includes pre-integrated services provided by trusted third parties, and allows health networks to quickly enable them. Once the crisis subsides, the Navigator can be modified to enable any phase that follows.
The Health Navigator includes health tech with the following pre-integrated services by trusted partners:
“There is no better time for the Identity and Health tech community to come together for what we have already been solving; easier trusted access, with privacy and consent. We are thrilled to be able to lend our work and collaborate with tech providers and health authorities during this time of crisis. We hope that our community builds on our open source project, to suit today’s imminent and evolving needs.” — Mike Cook, CEO of IDENTOS
For more information about IDENTOS’ COVID community initiatives: https://identos.com/covid-19/