Harlequins To Trial Its New COVID 19 Certification Technology

Premiership rugby union club Harlequins is promoting its Premiership home match against Bath as the first opportunity to trial its new COVID‑19 certification technology. The club aims to offer an option for supporters who would like to take part in testing the new technology for games at the Twickenham Stoop.

‘MyGP’, the UK’s largest independent healthcare management app, has partnered with V‑Health Passport to release the UK’s first vaccine certification technology for iOS users, with Android compatibility to follow in the coming weeks.

The ‘myGP TICKet’ feature, accessed within the ‘myGP’ app, displays whether a patient is sufficiently protected from COVID‑19 by surfacing a green tick around a user photo 12 days following their second vaccine dose.

This feature intends to provide a clinically assured means of proving a person’s vaccination status, displayed in real‑time, and generated directly from a patient’s medical record. It was piloted by Barchester Healthcare and Lilian Faithful care homes in March and will be rolling out across all platforms from today.

Currently available to patients at 97% of England’s GP practices, ‘myGP’ has worked with the NHS as an assured supplier, meaning the app is already an NHS‑approved access point for more than two million patients in England.

According to the Government’s roadmap for England May 17th is set as the earliest date from which sports fans can return to stadia and arenas. Harlequins’ first home match following this date is the Bath game on May 29th.

Harlequins CEO Laurie Dalrymple said of the ‘myGP TICKet’ technology:

“The current social distancing rules mean that most professional sports clubs and event venues will struggle to get up to 50% capacity, which in reality is not a financially viable business model. We are therefore very keen to look at all types of innovative solutions which could help safely support the return of greater number of fans to stadiums.

“The myGP app looks like an interesting technological solution and we are interested in collaborating to promote this new tool to our supporters ahead of the Bath match. This would be entirely optional for our supporters – those that would like to download the app and show their vaccination status on entry for example, can do so to help test the technology in a live environment. Any supporter attending who would prefer not to, will not be obliged to.”