depa × HealthTAG

An agreement on digital infrastructure

On 12 January 2023, the Digital Economy Promotion Agency, or depa, and HealthTAG Co., Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding to develop blockchain infrastructure for public services. Assistant Professor Dr. Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin, President and CEO, and Dr. Passakon Prathombutr, Senior Executive Vice President, signed for depa. Dechowat Promda, Chief Executive Officer, and Navarat Tinasuk, Chief Operating Officer, signed for HealthTAG.

The agreement set a direction for joint work on decentralized data infrastructure for public and citizen services. Its stated priorities included information security, data privacy, and participation by the sectors involved.

What the collaboration set out to do

The collaboration covered knowledge exchange with specialists, workforce development in applied blockchain technology, and cooperation among government, businesses, and the public at local, national, and international levels.

In this context, blockchain is a distributed ledger through which participants can refer to a common transaction history. Cryptography and distributed computing can make retrospective changes easier to detect and reduce reliance on a single intermediary. A working service must also assign data responsibility, user rights, and safeguards that suit each type of information.

Starting with a digital credential wallet

depa’s announcement identified a Digital Certificate Wallet as the initial pilot. The proposed approach combined a Self-sovereign Identity wallet, or SSI Wallet, with Decentralized Identifiers, or DIDs, so that people could hold and present digital credentials.

Assistant Professor Dr. Nuttapon described the shared infrastructure as a way for people to manage their own information more conveniently while maintaining security and privacy. The partners also intended to apply knowledge from the work when advising capable public and private organizations on future digital services.