Nothing matters more than your health. Not your job, not your home, not your burgeoning portfolio of tokens - it’s all for naught in the face of renal failure. We all know protecting our health is the first cornerstone of a life well lived.

But what about your health data? 

Private Health Matters

Implicitly, we believe in patient-doctor confidentiality. We expect a right to privacy. These most intimate details should be sacrosanct. There is not much more private in life than your health concerns. We would all be rightly outraged if our personal medical data became exposed, yet patient data is a key commercial battleground in a world where medicine is big business. We don’t want insurers abusing our medical data for higher premiums, we don’t want advertisers to know about our arthritis. 

That said, we do want all our physicians and/or practitioners to have access to the data they need to perform their job. Yet transferring health records between institutes is not always as smooth as it should be. Hospitals and doctors don’t talk to each other well. The bureaucracy of the system (designed to protect privacy) necessitates delays in getting patients the care they need. We would perhaps be more than willing to furnish our medical history to anyone who asked, say a dentist or a psychiatrist, but doing so is replete with hurdles.

Unlocking Siloed Patient Data

There’s a grander vision too. We all, in an ideal world, would be happy to contribute our data points to a larger data structure for use by scientists, researchers and doctors seeking breakthrough cures for common diseases. Maybe even a utopian medical AI dedicated to the pursuit of human wellness. Yet, rightfully, we abhor the privacy invasion of such structures, and fear the commercial tendrils poking around our literal private parts in the pursuit of extractive profit. Therefore, we are left with patient data siloed away from use by scientists, with specific data sets husbanded at enormous costs and through inefficient bureaucracies.

You see, data management isn’t just projects’ leads seeking better data-handling practices or trying to make their applications run faster in a competitive capitalist world (although that too), it’s about building a better world - about creating sovereign, interoperable data structures that can be used by the people who should use it for the benefit of us.

The Theoretical Power of Source Network

Source Network’s data management tools would theoretically allow any patient to take self-sovereign control of their medical data and let only those who need to see it use it - and they are in control. What’s more, patient data could be easily subdivided and shared piecemeal as appropriate - all with the patient’s explicit sovereign control and consent.

It can replace old inefficient centralized structures that meticulously guard data to the point of inefficiency. It can stop insurers poking around your health records for signs of weakness they can charge you for. It can stop employers getting hold of your data through data breaches and using it against you. It can stop your next door neighbor finding out about your cancer. An access control policy (ACP) isn’t just for companies, but for you, the individual. Your data and your rights in the face of a rapacious world that - if we are being cynical - is only looking to exploit you.

Yet it’s so much more than that still. The power of DefraDB is in its ability to create relational structures of access to data while maintaining its integrity at all times across vast intersecting fleets of devices and individuals seeking to access it. This means any researcher could, in theory, use your data if you grant access. And you could revoke it at any time. In fact, Source’s upcoming zero knowledge-based (ZK) analytics will help you get answers from data without seeing the data at all. This further mitigates data security risks, as unopened data cannot be copied. Future fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) will enable computation to be performed on top of encrypted data without having to reveal or know the data points used to obtain the end result, directly via P2P solutions to reduce system load and increase overall performance.

Data security is like a swiss army knife, and Source plans to enable developers to choose the right trust mechanism for their own data needs. If we could manage patient data better, quicker, faster, and with more precision - then the potential health benefits not just for the individual, but for society at large, could be incredible. 

Rather than just having your doctor look at your records, you could permit a fleet of medical AIs and researchers to look you over in the interests of their own research and in doing so come up with health outcomes that are better for you and all society - without you permanently surrendering your right to health privacy or having your private medical data commercialized beyond, perhaps, paying you for the privilege. 

Breaking the Healthcare Bottlenecks

All these things are currently impossible. Health data is hoarded either by large private companies who adhere to strict government-mandated due diligence, or is simply siloed away in government data vaults. With proper data management in the hands of every individual and their own personal ACPs about how, what and when it can be used, we can sidestep concerns of privacy and instead be far more collaborative and forward-thinking with our health data - if we choose to. 

If any given healthcare researcher suddenly has access to 10,000 data points instead of 100, because we have given willingly, and they didn’t have to pay some healthcare provider through the nose for access to it, their research would be so much more effective. This is just one of the many potential futures that powerful distributed data management can unlock for the individual and society - and that’s what we at Source Network are building every day. 

Doing the Basics Better

Of course, on a more mundane but no less essential level, proper compliance with health data and the advantages it brings is no different to proper compliance with commercial and consumer data and those advantages we have detailed elsewhere in these blogs. In a world of digital threat vectors, centralized repositories of health data is a major concern. Healthcare data breaches are a terrifying reality. 

Worst of all is the grubby commercialism behind your patient data, government regulated or otherwise, is a problem. An insurer with carte blanche access to your medical records may decide it’s time for your premiums to go up. This already happens in nations with highly privatized healthcare, and for the rest of the world, the threats loom ever larger, with governments forced into an uneasy alliance with private providers as the cost of caring for societies gets ever steeper. The UK is already considering faustian pacts with American pharmaceutical companies and AI companies to prop up the ailing NHS - and that’s just the beginning 

Look After Yourself

Sometimes we can lose sight of what’s really important, like our health. Source Network is building powerful tools for a truly decentralized, free, and self-sovereign internet - but that’s so much more than just helping companies have better data management or giving individuals better rights to their consumer data. It’s the scaling, multiplicative effort of these technologies once implemented, and patient data is a fantastic example. 

If we had sovereign patient data, we could all be more willing about who and what gets access and, by doing that, we not only better protect our privacy and our health, but advance the privacy and health of our society as a whole. 

If that isn’t good for you, we don’t know what is.