Decentralized Medicine
As a patient, you must be thinking: how many people have access to your medical records?
Patients widely believe that they have no idea where their medical data is kept once collected. In addition, it is difficult for patients to check who has access to their medical records in the health exchange marketplace because of the monopoly of a few prominent players.
Most individuals are under the impression that their medical records are only accessible by their healthcare providers and those to whom they have granted permission (such as family members).
But guess what, that’s not true. No matter how surprised you are when reading this, there are considerable complexities in medical records’ safety when using recorded data about patients. For example, you might be surprised to learn that other people and organizations can see your medical records without your permission. And they can also use that data for their own purposes, like research, testing, and more.
Electronic health records, such as those developed by Epic Software and others, now store medical data digitally. However, that data is not only of interest to doctors. To find new markers of disease, train diagnostic algorithms, and create risk calculators that evaluate surgical candidates, medical researchers buy large, anonymized data sets from the databases. Unfortunately…
