The SMART Health Card framework is an open source[1] immunity passport program designed to store and share medical information in paper or digital form.

[4][5] It was rolled out by the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) based on technology developed at Boston Children's Hospital,[6] and standards set by Health Level Seven International (HL7) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

[5] In February 2009, United States president Barack Obama signed an economic stimulus package which included $19 billion in funds for investment in health information technology.

The following month, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Kenneth Mandl and Isaac Kohane, published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine calling for the modernization of electronic health records through API integrations on mobile devices.

[11] According to SMART Health IT, Mandl successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a universal API requirement in the 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law on December 13, 2016.

[6][15][16][17] On January 14, 2021, the Mitre Corporation announced the launch of a new public–private partnership called the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) alongside the CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic Systems, Evernorth, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle, Safe Health, and Salesforce.

[34] On October 13, 2021, the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) published a statement encouraging adoption of SMART Health Cards as a common standard "where allowed by local law and policy.