| If a sports venue or theater will one day require customers to prove they've been vaccinated against Covid-19 before allowing entry, how will they do it? A venture between the most populous U.S. county and a tech startup called Healthvana may offer a clue. Under the program, vaccine recipients in Los Angeles County, a virus hot spot, will be offered a digital record that will help ensure they get a second shot. It's initially geared toward ensuring people receive both doses of the two-shot regimen through text messages and other prompts. But it will also give recipients a way to verify they've been vaccinated, which they can put into an Apple Wallet or competing Google platform "to prove to airlines, to prove to schools, to prove to whoever needs it," said Healthvana Chief Executive Officer Ramin Bastani. Los Angeles-based Healthvana, founded in late 2014, runs a software platform that delivers test results to patients for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. It began working with the county earlier this year to provide Covid-19 test results.  Those prior relationships with area residents made the startup a good fit for the digital vaccine record, said Claire Jarashow, director of vaccine preventable disease control at the county's Department of Public Health. Los Angeles County last week broke its record of new Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations. It's been racing to distribute vaccines "as quickly as humanly possible," Jarashow said. While the immunizations are being tracked in registries, public-health officials there also saw a need to give patients ownership of their own records, Jarashow said. They will receive a paper card tracking which vaccine they received and when. But of course a card could easily be lost, which is where digital records come into play. Tracking Covid-19 vaccine recipients and authenticating immunization status are poised to become increasingly important in the U.S. and globally as vaccines are rolled out. That's sparked a race among players like IBM to provide technological solutions, envisioning a world in which vaccination records can be used to grant access to places where people may gather, or be in close proximity. With private health records involved, those efforts have also raised questions. Jarashow said the county has worked through the issues of granting a private company access to its residents' protected health information. Healthvana stores the data on Amazon Web Services servers that comply with federal regulations, according to Bastani, the CEO. "It's as safe as we can make it," Jarashow said. "I would feel comfortable using it, so I hope that's reassuring." Healthvana is also in discussions with concert venues, employers, universities and schools—"anyone who has a large number of people interacting with them"—about applying the technology, Bastani said. "It's not going to be like one credit card you can use across the U.S.," he said. "Sometimes you can pay cash, sometimes you can use your Apple Wallet."—Emma Court | 
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