The answer, in my view, is exactly the opposite of what is happening. Individuals should have more, not less information and data files on site, or on their own storage facilities, such as USB cards or hard drives. In particular, and this is where SanDisk could profit eventually, what if every person carried a health card containing, say, 5 GB or health data? For most people, this would be a lifetime of medical records, including even x-rays and other non-textual data. Suppose the card were the size of an ordinary credit card, but embedded in that card was archival type flash memory (write once, read often) probably in pdf format, which could be read by virtually all computers in any hospital or doctor's office. Whenever the patient needed medical services, the entire health record would be immediately available to the service provider.
Instead, the trend, especially in health services, is to create remote servers containing patient data which is fed into the servers by attending physicians or assistants, or treatment facilities. Under current health regulations, the patient has a right to restrict access to this data, but the usual case is that the patient waves the right in order that the records can be centralized. One result of this is a practice noted in today's New York Times, where bill collectors are admitted to hospitals, with privileges similar to hospital employees, enabling them to access patient records and confront patients in the emergency room, threatening them with no treatment until they pay for prior treatment. This is actually happening, and the Minnesota Attorney General is ready to prosecute one of the largest hospital bill collectors for acting in this manner.
Art, you have the option of not participating in the cloud, but it seems that you are in the minority. The cloud is happening and those who care about security either do not use it or use it in ways where they can use private encryption.
Furthermore the health care card does not make sense for SanDisk to create by itself. It would simply finish up a commodity supplier of low end cards to specialty medical records companies. Even Apple business probably gives greater margins. And the biggest market for health care is older folks and you can bet that health care providers would rather have a centralized system than rely on the patients not losing or forgetting their cards. You would need a centralized system anyway to deal with forgotten cards, test results arriving in the patients' absence etc. Why complicate it with a parallel system of cards?
If you are rushed to the emergency room unconscious and without your wallet, would you like the doctors to have access to centralized detailed records that might contain life-saving information or to make generic guesses about your needs based on the average for a person of your age, weight, blood type etc. |
