otter , 10 months ago

Here’s a more technical one: health information

It’s a huge pain trying to transfer health information, between patients, doctors, different clinics, hospitals, etc. If you try and move far enough, your records might get transferred as a bunch of PDFs or scanned images on a CD.

There is no good standard that ticks all the boxes, so it’s not just a matter of getting everyone to agree. A solid standard that addresses all the needs would be amazing, and it would help improve healthcare so much.

People would get control over their own health information (as much as appropriate without causing unnecessary harm), and we could properly use health tracking data from biometrics devices for personalized care. We could do large scale studies using properly anonymized data, and we wouldn’t have proprietary systems to try and work around.

Best of all, you could go to a new clinic/hospital/ER and you wouldn’t need to enter the same information all over again (likely missing clinically relevant data along the way).