Leveraging technology for healthcare and retaining access to personal health data to enhance personal health and well-being

Health data are a sensitive category of personal data. They can result in a high risk to individuals and health information-handling rights and opportunities unless there is a sufficient defense. Reasonable security standards are needed to protect electronic health records (EHRs). All personal data handling needs adequate explanation. Maintaining access to medical data, even in the developing world, would favor health and well-being across the world. Unfortunately, there are still countries that hinder the portability of medical records. Numerous occurrences have shown that it still takes weeks for medical data to be ported from one general physician to another. Cross-border portability is almost impossible due to the lack of technical infrastructure and standardization. The authors demonstrate the difficulty of the portability of medical records with some example case studies as a collaborative engagement exercise through a data-mapping process to describe how different people and datapoints interact and evaluate EHR portability techniques. They then propose a blockchain-based EHR system that allows secure and cross-border sharing of medical data. The ethical and technical challenges around having such a system are also been discussed.