Share healthcare data

One of the most important things to most people is their health. The western world is spending fortunes on medical care and on inventing new medicines and treatments every day. We do however see that one area where a lot of good can be done is still lacking behind. This is the way we handle data in the healthcare systems. Several countries have tried to implement systems to handle and share patient data in a national system. Most of them have failed. The reason for failing are several. Security and privacy are some that come directly to mind.

When you are handling personal data, and maybe even specially when handling medical personal data, is that  we have to extremely careful that the data is used for the correct purpose and is not falling in the wrong hands. However having the option to quickly share data about patients can safe lives and can make the medical costs for handling patients go down.

Currently we are spending money on redoing tests, finding lost data during transfer and making the wrong decissions on a daily basis. Mark Blatt, Worldwide Medical Director at Intel, has some thoughts on this, one of the slides from a presentation given by Mark Blatt shows the collaborative workflows that could be used in the medical industry.

most of us will agree that sharing medical information will help the medical system and will benefit the patient. What most of us do not agree upon is the way how this should be implemented and especially in consideration with patient confidentiality and privacy. Finding the right way of doing this is however, in my opinion one of the big challenges that the IT industry will have to take upon itself together with the medical industry and governments. We all do recognize that the medical costs are skyrocketing and that, if we want to be able to make use of the medical care we against a price we can pay we have to find ways to make this less expensive. In my opinion sharing data can be a big step into this process of cutting down costs.

Below is a part of a presentation given by Mark Blatt;