Ownership of Patient Health Records

Today, our health records are not just entries in a journal locked in the hospital's drawer, they are virtual entries in a database locked in the hospital's digital drawer... The difference comes with the accessibility. Of course, doctors are using the same knowledge for health assessment and diagnosis as they used to have, but now they are able to access more of our current and historical health information and faster. The information became more vulnerable to fraudulence, yet the benefits are heavier.

Now, it is argued that if we would be better off having the responsibility of holding our PHRs. This liberty allows us to decide to use our information as we like, such as using health predictions, sharing with health institutions or pharmaceutical companies. However, it will surely increase the security and privacy problems as well as fraudulence.

On the other side, there is this promising side about big data. Since the data accumulated and aggregated over the time, the big data emerged as a pile of unprocessed gold mine. It is gold because our personal data has become more valuable as we are figuring out how to process it. Today, thousands of data pieces are required to run algorithms to effectively generate better estimations. As applied to PHR, it raises the stakes. We are running cutting edge machine learning / deep learning algorithm to understand the facts about population health. In the whole process, the permission to use PHR is up to the agencies or health institutions. If we hold the access key, it may lead to more independent work on predictions in healthcare, yet still keeps the privacy concerns alive.

So, considering our needs and sensitivity of required data, the emerging question is: 'Shall we keep the liberty to share and store our PHR or leave it to the third parties?' It is a hard decision to make since we are familiar with the security and privacy cases with the current personal data. Thus, PHR may need better standards and regulations to be applied before proceeding to personal ownership stage.