The Africa Care Digital Health ID is your personal health identity, linked to a QR code on your phone. It exists to connect your healthcare around you: to help every clinician you see identify you correctly, to carry the emergency information you choose to share, and to give you one place to see and control your health information.
The obvious question is the right one to ask: if a code can be scanned, who gets to see what? The answer is the principle the whole service is built on.
Your QR code is a keyhole, not a key
Scanning your code never opens your health record by itself. What a scan reveals depends entirely on who is scanning.
Anyone who scans
A public or emergency scan — by anyone, without logging in — shows only your emergency profile, and only the fields you have switched on. If your emergency profile is off, a public scan shows nothing at all. It never shows your ID number, your home address or your full health record.
A verified clinician
Protected information is only available inside the secure Africa Care professional environment. Before anything is shown, a clinician must sign in to a verified professional account, declare a lawful care relationship with you, and pass role-based permission checks. Every access is logged — and you can see that log.
You decide what's visible
Your emergency profile is off by default. If you switch it on, you choose each field individually from the supported set — things like allergies and severe drug reactions, significant conditions, current critical medication, implanted devices, an emergency contact, or your blood group where it's reliably recorded. You can preview exactly what a stranger would see, and change or switch off any field at any time.
If you're ever at risk of harassment or violence, think carefully before adding anything that could reveal your relationships or location. The app reminds you of this each time you switch a field on.
You can see who looked
Your privacy dashboard shows a plain-language history of who accessed your record and when. You can grant, scope and revoke access for practices, ask for your information to be corrected, and suspend and reissue your QR code at any time — for example if a card is lost.
What we promise
- We never sell your health information — to anyone, ever.
- Your health information is never used for advertising or to target you.
- Holding a Digital Health ID doesn't depend on your income, medical aid membership or whether you use public or private care.
For clinicians: why you want your patients to have one
When your patients hold a Digital Health ID, the information you need arrives with them instead of being rebuilt from memory at every visit. One scan identifies the right patient first time. Consultation, discharge and referral summaries associated with the ID follow the patient between providers — with their permission, and with every access logged. And the essentials they chose to share are one scan away in an emergency: an aid to your assessment, never a replacement for it.
Getting patients on board is simple: send an invitation from your practice so a patient can claim their ID and link it to your practice file, or point them to id.africa-care.com.
Not an emergency service
The Digital Health ID supports care, but it never replaces professional medical judgement and it is not an emergency service. In an emergency in South Africa, call 112 from a mobile phone or 10177 for an ambulance. The full Digital Health ID Terms and Privacy Policy are published at id.africa-care.com, and questions can go to patients@africa-care.com.
