Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Maps, Property and Health Data


Leonard J. Kish and Eric J Topol just released a great article "Unpatients - why patients should own their own data".   Nature Biotechnology 33,921–924 doi:10.1038/nbt.3340 .

The article estimates 80,000 people a year die in the US due to poor health information flows.    This is criminal - especially in light of the $30 billion the EHR industry has had in incentives from the US government since 2010 to build health information infrastructure.

The solution proposed in the article is to have a new legal framework that recognizes a digitized human beings data ownership.     For Eric Topol, maps provide the foundation for ownership - meaning people would own the map of their location on earth over time, the map of their body and the map of their genome.     Perhaps the Supreme Court will establish a legal definition for a "digitized human being" Eric Topol and Leonard Kish describe and grant us life instead of a medical errors.

- Alicemarie G Rathjen

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