Today, your care is documented electronically in a health care information system.
That information, if structured, resides in a database and is available for other secondary purposes. You may think that your health data is safe and secure, private and confidential. HIPAA protects health data used by covered entities (health care providers, facilities and clearinghouses - like insurance companies). Once that data is in their database, it is available to anyone for any purpose, as long as it fits a definition of treatment, payment and health care operations.
So, think your data sits idle? Think your data is static? Think again...it is used for many secondary purposes like quality, population health and care management (risk adjustment, attributed populations, health care utilization patterns, cost).
If ledger-driven distributed networks take hold in health care - an audit trail of who, used what, at what time and for what purpose? Maybe you don't care. But maybe we all should.
Health care data is the most sensitive data that individuals own!
Data scientist and consumer health data sharing preference expert -