How much medical information would you share in the name of big data?

Harnessing data for healthcare provision and research is improving, but barriers such as privacy concerns, mistrust and medical culture are holding it back

When Anil Sethi's sister was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, it reinforced to him the lack of control patients in the US have over their own health data. In a fragmented system, where a patient may see many clinicians across different states who are all bound by strict data disclosure regulations, it can be a rigmarole to have to explain each time their current and past medications, the results of recent lab tests, past diagnoses and so forth.

Sethi's response is Gliimpse. The veteran healthcare entrepreneur is developing an app which aims to digitise health by downloading "health information that is available to [patients] on distributed and fragmented portals". It will give people an online mechanism for collating essential medical data and converting it into a more understandable format.