Selling Our Own Data

“The most interesting feature of blockchain in the health sector is the ability of patients to own and control their own health information,” says Jackson, from Canada’s Institute on Governance.

“If all this information was linked to an identity patients control, they could decide who gets to see what. Maybe a knee specialist doesn’t need access to your sexual health history. Blockchain could allow for this level of personal control.”

“Not to mention,” Jackson continues, “those patients could actually profit from their health and demographic data, with the option to sell it to health research studies or drug discovery.”

That possibility has occurred to Espinosa, too. Linnea, unlike MedRec, is a commercial company; while it started out as “a data protocol for longitudinal health,” it has since widened in the scope and scale of its ambition.

For Espinosa, Linnea has become an opportunity to come up with an entirely new way of approaching health — and life.

“The idea was that it has to start with tracking,” Espinosa says. “I’m not necessarily talking about all the ins and outs of data when you went to a hospital. I’m talking about your genome, your nutrition, and your fitness data. Even what your mother’s pregnancy was like; when you were born; your parents’ genome. Your microbiome. All of these things are important to maximizing your health over long periods of time, and yet we don’t track them.”

That data would then be kept on the blockchain, with permission for its transfer given by the patient to a provider via the system, like with MedRec, with the bonus that it’s not just for healthcare providers — we could just as easily send our data to “an insurance company that wants to give you a reward,” Espinosa says.

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“The holy grail for that is we use all this tracking to fuel machine-learning models,” Espinosa continues. “And those models will identify robust patterns that say, ‘If you do this in your twenties, here’s the impact in your fifties, so you don’t want to do that.’ And that causality, once it really gets established in people’s minds, can help them make the right decisions. Because right now it’s like, ‘I’ll do what I like today and worry about it when I go and see the doctor, but really my doctor is in charge of my health.’ And it’s like, no!

“If we own our data, we have agency over our data, then we also own our health,” Espinosa says. “And that’s a sea change.”

Blog Credits: Medium