PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Skyflow today announced it has joined the two leading standards bodies for Covid-19 vaccine credentials (“passports”) -- the Vaccination Credentials Initiative supported by Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, and Epic, among others; and the PathCheck Foundation, a non-profit spin-off from MIT dedicated to enabling open-source, privacy-preserving technology and public health solutions to contain Covid-19.
Re-opening Travel Requires Open Standards and Data Privacy
The spread of Covid-19 has slowed with the accelerated rollout of vaccinations in the United States. Organizations like government agencies, airlines, and private corporations are already using verified test and vaccination data to return to normalcy.
The next step is to offer citizens the option of using Covid-19 “passport” apps to make travel, work and entertainment safer and easier. These apps must ensure privacy and security as well as effectiveness. These apps should also be based on open standards that ensure trust and enable interoperability, must utilize proven technologies, and must meet the highest standards for user privacy when it comes to sensitive health and personal data.
The standards organizations, working in partnership with governments, healthcare, and technology industry leaders including Skyflow, are leading the establishment of global standards and best practices for Covid passport apps. Skyflow’s Covid-19 solution is based on its unique data privacy vault technology and works with all the emerging standards and best practices.
“Joining forces with the VCI, and the PathCheck Foundation, ensure our Covid solutions are aligned with open, global standards and can work for any government agency or private organization,” said Anshu Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Skyflow. “We’re proud to be able to bring our data privacy vault technology to bear in the effort to help control Covid and re-open society.”
“Skyflow’s approach to handling sensitive personal healthcare information dovetails perfectly with the mission of PathCheck,” said Ramesh Raskar, founder of the PathCheck Foundation and Associate Professor at MIT’s Media Lab. “PathCheck believes that Covid solutions must be reliable, standards-based, and widely adopted to be effective. But to be widely adopted they must be trusted—and ensuring data privacy is critical to trust.”
Skyflow’s Covid-19 Solution
Skyflow’s new passport solutions for Covid-19 testing and vaccination are built on Skyflow’s privacy-preserving vault technology and designed to help re-open the global economy. Intended for private industry, government agencies, and any organization that needs a way to securely collect and share Covid test and vaccination data, the solutions include a customizable mobile app aimed at patients, a secure data vault, and data sharing capabilities designed with patient privacy as a first principle. Both HIPAA and PCI compliance are built-in, and the fully customizable solution can be deployed to users very rapidly, sometimes in a matter of days.
An early version of the solution was a winner in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services design-a-thon, where Skyflow’s approach was unique in its scalability and approach to privacy and patient consent, and stood out in a field otherwise focused on buzzwords and unproven technology like blockchain.
Skyflow’s Radical Approach: Goes Beyond Compliance
Skyflow takes a different approach. Inspired by the data vaults built internally by companies like Apple, Google, and Netflix that spend tens of millions of dollars on privacy, Skyflow has built a zero-trust data vault that any company can use. At its core, the Skyflow data privacy vault is powered by a radical new approach called polymorphic encryption, which utilizes the latest industry-standard encryption and tokenization algorithms. Skyflow is delivered as a simple API, making it easy and quick for developers to build powerful data privacy technology and regulatory compliance into everything they build.
About Skyflow
Founded in 2019, Skyflow is a data privacy vault for customer data. The company was founded by former Salesforce executives Anshu Sharma (CEO) and Prakash Khot (CTO) who wanted to radically transform how businesses handle users’ financial, healthcare, and other personal data that powers the digital economy. Skyflow is based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit skyflow.com or follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.
