Standard Health QR Code

Beijing Youth Daily May 4

The State Administration for Market Regulation has released a national standard on personal health information codes, which specifies data management requirements for the collection, processing and use of personal health information during the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, aiming to facilitate the sharing of health information related to COVID-19.

Facing a dilemma over how to prevent a re-emergence of COVID-19 in China while boosting the country’s economy, many provinces and municipalities had previously introduced their own health QR code systems

in an attempt to get people back to work while continuing to track any possible spread of the virus.

There are currently around 100 types of health QR code in operation across the country. It has been reported that people from some high-risk areas, despite having been issued a green-color code indicating good health by their home province, have been put into selfquarantine by other cities due to a lack of information sharing and universal recognition of their respective systems.

Once those systems are standardized, various applications will be able to obtain personal health information through a unified interface. Such a standard can help provinces to acknowledge each other’s health codes, facilitate travel, and ensure personal privacy while sharing information more easily.

This standard can also be kept for future application. In the case of similar public emergencies, it could be used to quickly launch a unified national health code.