Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technologies offer health care consumers a tracking and auditing mechanism. Allowing for the monitoring of when, how and for what purpose their health care data is being used.
Why is this important? Because today, your personal health care data is used for hundreds of purposes that you as a consumer have no idea are occurring. Maybe, if you don't value privacy, this isn't a big deal. However, as our lives become less private and confidentiality standards change, health care data is one of the last data types that has special protections - or so people assume.
First, HIPAA provides protections for your data if it is associated with an administrative transaction. HIPAA is about decreasing administrative burden for covered entities when data exchange is needed to do the business of health care. A covered entity is a health care provider, a payer (insurance company) or clearinghouse. The law actually does not require consumer permission to use your data if it is for one of three purposes - treatment, payment or health care operations.
That means that your data, collected during a treatment encounter, saved in a data base - can be used for 1000's of other purposes.
Data is an asset. It is worth $$$$. Shouldn't consumers benefit from their data being used for secondary purposes?
Health Data Sharing Preference Expert -