Apple has announced plans to add support for “verifiable health records,” including COVID-19 vaccination cards, to its Wallet payments and identification app in an upcoming software update.
The company said on its developer website that its Health app was updated with iOS 15 to support medical records that comply with the SMART Health Cards specification developed by the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program. Soon those records will also make their way to Wallet, which is pre-installed on every iPhone and Apple Watch.
Apple said users will soon be able to “choose to add verifiable COVID-19 vaccination records as a vaccination card in Apple Wallet to present to businesses, venues, and more.” It’s also working on letting developers “use a new button to let users know that they can securely download and store their vaccination information in the Health app and quickly add and present it from Wallet.”
This is part of Apple’s continued push to make Wallet more than just a payments-related app. Technically it’s been more than a front-end for Apple Pay since its debut, but the release of iOS 15 has greatly expanded its utility by allowing it to be used to access transit services, store student IDs, manage digital car keys, and manage government-issued IDs in participating states.
The company has also focused much of its effort on COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. It has added support for exposure notifications, made it easy to find vaccination sites in the US via Apple Maps, and combated efforts to use the App Store to spread misinformation or gather private data via contact-tracing apps by limiting the category to credentialed institutions.
Apple didn’t say when it plans to release the update that will bring verifiable health records support to Wallet, but MacRumors reported that the feature will arrive with iOS 15.1’s release.
