In the face of COVID-19, businesses needed a trusted and reliable way of ensuring the safety of their customers while also keeping their doors open. FreshWorks Studio partnered with the Province of British Columbia’s Ministry of Health to create a mobile application that does just that.

COVID-19 impacted each of us in ways that we wouldn’t have been able to predict. The Province of BC quickly found itself needing to verify the vaccination records of millions of residents. They also needed to protect public health interests, keep businesses’ doors open, and help British Columbians return to a normal lifestyle.

In September of 2021, the BC Government announced that proof of vaccination would be required for non-essential events and service, including restaurants.   

Modernizing citizen services and creating new forms of digital identity verification has been a high priority for governments across the globe in recent years. The Province of BC has been focusing on digital governance for some time. We have partnered with them to enhance digital governance many times in the past. 

COVID-19 created tremendous pressure to make a new system with a clear priority – securely and discretely verify digital vaccination records for all citizens in BC.

The Province needed a unified verification solution that businesses, residents, and visitors would all be able to use and depend on. The implementation of verification criteria, much like a physical driver’s license or passport, hasn’t previously been done in a digital medium and at this scale within Canada. As such, the solution would need to be incredibly simple, easy to implement, distribute and scale.

The extraordinary challenges COVID presents requires a solution to match. Enter the BC Vaccine Card Verifier App. It takes up less than 13mb of storage, doesn’t require a sign up, is 100% functional offline and doesn’t even need the entire QR code to be visible upon scanning. 

The best solutions are often simple. The BC vaccine card verifier app’s only function is to scan the vaccine QR code and return a trusted and verified answer about a citizen’s vaccination status.

Each QR code is able to store an individual’s vaccination status and the criteria for status requirements can be changed globally without any action required from its users. As time goes on and the nature of the pandemic changes, governments may seek to change their required vaccine criteria. The end user, BC businesses, British Colombians and visitors, will never have to update their QR code.

Within 30 seconds or less of the user downloading the BC vaccine card verifier app, it is ready to be used. This is possible because all of the user validation data is stored in the vaccine QR code itself, requiring the app only to recognize the code and display the status to the verifier. The only thing the app asks of its users is to enable camera permissions – that’s it! 

The interface will display one of four outputs based on the data held within the vaccine QR code. Vaccinated, partially vaccinated, unvaccinated, and not found. The criteria for what qualifies a user to be verified in any of these four groups can be altered as requirements update and the nature of the pandemic changes.

No one was able to anticipate the impact and scale of COVID-19. Even still, governments were required to act quickly to reduce the tremendous impacts of the pandemic. In less than one month FreshWorks created a fast, reliable and trustworthy vaccine QR code scanner and verifier. This app is used as the exclusive vaccine verification technology for COVID-19 in the Province of British Columbia

On April 8th, 2022, the Provincial Health Office of BC officially lifted the requirement for all businesses and non-essential services to require verification of a vaccine passport. Some businesses may continue to require vaccine verification and policy shifts could reinstate vaccination verification requirements in the future. Even still, we see this update as a signal of a project well designed, implemented, tested and completed.

Our team built the verifier app with a simple set of tools. The Android app for the vaccine verifier was built in Kotlin and utilizes Dagger Hilt and Google Vision API. The iOS app was developed in the Swift programming language using UIkit and JOSESwift frameworks.

Attempting to predict the future of the pandemic is impossible. This technology, however, is not tied to COVID-19 in its application. FreshWorks Studio has a history of supporting the modernizing of digital government services, touching points and resources. Partnering with the BC Government in their effort to create a seamless and lightweight digital verification system is the proof of concept that big jobs can be addressed with simple and effective digital applications. 

Now more than ever, governments see the need for simple and easy to use online interfaces being provided to their constituents. We see a future where Canadian’s live without lines, unnecessary paper forms, phone waits, unclear information, inaccessible services, and unintuitive digital user interfaces. The Vaccine Card Verifier App is a step in the right direction and a piece of evidence that this future is possible.