Who controls your health data? You or someone else?

Every time you surf the Net, your data is used without your receiving anything in return and without any anti-piracy or anti-fraud guarantees. Blockchain restores power over your digital identity, which is particularly important in the health field.

The current pandemic shows the advantages and risks involved in consolidating health data. Your data can be used to help understand contagion and advance the search for a vaccine, but it can also be used to find out who you spend your time with. You may agree with one use and not the other – but no one’s asked for your agreement in either case.

Blockchain provides a solution to this loss of control: it can create a digital identity for you that consolidates all your data, including health data. This means your information is secure and anonymous. You must give your consent for it to be used. The patient/healthcare provider relationship is balanced. Your medical file on blockchain follows you everywhere; it’s also encrypted and is used only within the limits that you yourself set – for example, to contribute to a vaccine project.

To go further

What Blockchain Could Mean for Your Health Data

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, (Harvard Business Review, june 2020).

Published by Françoise Tollet

She spent 12 years in industry, working for Bolloré Technologies, among others. She co-founded Business Digest in 1992 and has been running the company since 1998. And she took the Internet plunge in 1996, even before coming on board as part of the BD team. 