The twin forces of privacy law and data breaches have fundamentally challenged how we collect, store, and share sensitive information. Within this landscape, healthcare information is sacrosanct – and intimately tied to identity and data ownership. Building on prior work with UCLA Health, Genentech (a member of the Roche Group), Sanofi, Amgen, Biogen, and others, we offer this opinion piece to promote the development of a standard for decentralized Verifiable Credentials (VCs). This will empower Authorized Trading Partners (ATPs) in the pharmaceutical supply chain to trade and exchange information in compliance with the US federal law. Starting with credentialing and interoperability for the ATP community, our ultimate goal was to chart a path to a global standard for all health care VCs – providing individuals and health-care professionals control over their own data. By sharing our results and releasing essential components of the work to the public domain, we hope to align and connect with other foundational efforts, thus evolving standards within a truly open framework with broad stakeholder involvement.

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