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I have a similar feeling towards financial institutions. When you apply for a mortgage, you have to send your entire financial history, by mail (or perhaps wor

by rsobers 14y ago

I have a similar feeling towards financial institutions. When you apply for a mortgage, you have to send your entire financial history, by mail (or perhaps worse, by email), to an underwriter. There's no indication as to what happens to all that sensitive stuff afterwards. It's a complete black box. I think there's a huge opportunity for some sort of app that gives the customer/patient visibility of their data during its entire lifecycle and gives them controls to revoke access, delete data, etc. (Kinda like I can revoke an OAuth token.)

NittLion78 14y ago
To be fair, re: the financial data, most institutions are required by SEC/FINRA to determine your net worth/assets at the time of application. So, to some degree, it makes sense you have to fill it out every time. There's no reason it has to be on paper, though...
- rsobers 14y ago
  More to the point: what happens to that mound of sensitive data? Does it sit in a filing cabinet? If it's digital, does my underwriter forward it to her Gmail account so she can do the review on her couch?
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    Having just bought a house in the past month, i'm going to say that they fax it around 5 or 6 times, then they forward that to their gmail account. That way it looks like crap by the time it gets back to you.
jtheory 14y ago
That's what we're doing at PatientsKnowBest.com -- patient-centered medical records where the patient can decide who can see their records, and revoke access if they want. No one can revoke the patient's access. Putting the patient at the helm has a few wonderful effects -- among them: all of the red tape around transferring patient medical records from one doctor/institution to another pretty much disappears. They're all about making sure the patient's private data doesn't go to someone the patient wouldn't want to see it. The only reason they need all of those laws is because the patient isn't even in the loop, normally. We have the core webapp UI; we also have a REST/JSON API for letting apps (and third parties) work with the patient's data (if given permission, of course). It's a really interesting space to be in. (I'm sure reading the about raises lots of "but what about when" questions; we have answers ...mostly!) Edit: I should have said: that's what we're doing w/ medical records (not with financial data)
- dataisfun 14y ago
  Rob, you beat me to the punch :)
- rsobers 14y ago
  This is awesome. I love the idea (obviously, since I thought I invented it an hour ago ;-)!
- eric-hu 14y ago
  You guys are providing a service I'm interested in. I checked out your website and, as an interested (American) patient, I could be further convinced if a couple of questions were answered: 1. Which doctors and insurance plans does PatientsKnowBest work with? 2. Where is my data stored? What happens if I decide to stop using PKB? I should add that I didn't want to spend the time to watch the 20 second videos, but perhaps I'm not the kind of customer you're trying to capture at the moment
abgoldstein 14y ago
Great point! A lot of people in the clinical world and health IT world completely agree with you. The real difficulty is opening the channel for secure communication between practices and hospitals, electronic health record vendors, and health information exchanges. Have you heard of RHEx (http://wiki.siframework.org/RHEx http://wiki.siframework.org/RHEx, https://github.com/project-rhex/simple_rhex https://github.com/project-rhex/simple_rhex)? It's an open source implementation of hData (http://www.projecthdata.org http://www.projecthdata.org) and provides a RESTful, secure way to transmit patient data.

by rsobers 14y ago

NittLion78 14y ago

To be fair, re: the financial data, most institutions are required by SEC/FINRA to determine your net worth/assets at the time of application. So, to some degree, it makes sense you have to fill it out every time. There's no reason it has to be on paper, though...

rsobers 14y ago
More to the point: what happens to that mound of sensitive data? Does it sit in a filing cabinet? If it's digital, does my underwriter forward it to her Gmail account so she can do the review on her couch?
- DannyBee 14y ago
  Having just bought a house in the past month, i'm going to say that they fax it around 5 or 6 times, then they forward that to their gmail account. That way it looks like crap by the time it gets back to you.

jtheory 14y ago

That's what we're doing at PatientsKnowBest.com -- patient-centered medical records where the patient can decide who can see their records, and revoke access if they want. No one can revoke the patient's access. Putting the patient at the helm has a few wonderful effects -- among them: all of the red tape around transferring patient medical records from one doctor/institution to another pretty much disappears. They're all about making sure the patient's private data doesn't go to someone the patient wouldn't want to see it. The only reason they need all of those laws is because the patient isn't even in the loop, normally. We have the core webapp UI; we also have a REST/JSON API for letting apps (and third parties) work with the patient's data (if given permission, of course). It's a really interesting space to be in. (I'm sure reading the about raises lots of "but what about when" questions; we have answers ...mostly!) Edit: I should have said: that's what we're doing w/ medical records (not with financial data)

dataisfun 14y ago
Rob, you beat me to the punch :)
rsobers 14y ago
This is awesome. I love the idea (obviously, since I thought I invented it an hour ago ;-)!
eric-hu 14y ago
You guys are providing a service I'm interested in. I checked out your website and, as an interested (American) patient, I could be further convinced if a couple of questions were answered: 1. Which doctors and insurance plans does PatientsKnowBest work with? 2. Where is my data stored? What happens if I decide to stop using PKB? I should add that I didn't want to spend the time to watch the 20 second videos, but perhaps I'm not the kind of customer you're trying to capture at the moment

abgoldstein 14y ago

Great point! A lot of people in the clinical world and health IT world completely agree with you. The real difficulty is opening the channel for secure communication between practices and hospitals, electronic health record vendors, and health information exchanges. Have you heard of RHEx (http://wiki.siframework.org/RHEx http://wiki.siframework.org/RHEx, https://github.com/project-rhex/simple_rhex https://github.com/project-rhex/simple_rhex)? It's an open source implementation of hData (http://www.projecthdata.org http://www.projecthdata.org) and provides a RESTful, secure way to transmit patient data.