HealthTech is currently running at full speed. In the wrong direction.
The agenda for 'old school' technologists is to commercialise the statutory and insurance environment with templates for patients' data as a billing machine. Privacy gets lip service, but it's simply not consistent with any form of database technology. That's all of them.
* OldTech in white coats.
Computing's potential to assist health professionals starts with Practice Management Systems (PMS) in clinical settings, and extends to a cornucopia of online services for patients' pathology, imaging and specialised medicine.
The impetus for a central repository, to help govern the delivery of patients' health records, has fallen foul of numerous contesting agendas. The solutions became a problem in their own right, with patients' privacy making headlines, along with doctors' frustrations at 'too many administration tasks'. 'Nobody uses it, apart from spotting drug-seekers'.
The best solution to any intractable problem is to not have it. SovereignSilo advocates the step change necessary to simplify the role of computing in healthcare, by putting world's best practice security into patients and doctors hands - with no intermediate systems/agendas.
Hiding in plain sight is a yawning flaw in the assumption patients can trust computing in even a clinical setting. Trust us. We're (Microsoft) doctors.
The failures of online HeathTech around patient privacy are legend, with the worst insults written off as 'a mistake'.
A booking platform gets caught selling patient data to insurance providers, and blames some kind of accident?
The government hasn't the chops or the will to address any of this, to the extent they gift more and more business to the same culprits. Because. Canberra.
Healthcare technology providers are fundamentally conflicted, because of Canberra's role as the prime sponsor for all healthcare services.
The fish rots from the head back, and the more money Canberra throws at the problem, the less likely anyone is to call bullshit. Because. Accountants.
Australia just spent $70M on a Vaccine Visa platform that Europe has deployed, FOC, to any takers. Now it doesn't work outside the bubble that is Canberra consultancy.
The pattern is obvious. It's just indelible from inside this room. You cannot fix HeathTech without pissing off some deeply vested interests. Bigly.
The fundamental premise that everyone's data can somehow be 'managed' in a 'secure environment' is deeply flawed. At a structural level. This is a given. Fact.
Notwithstanding the technical vulnerabilities (which .gov and its corporate cohorts have so abjectly failed to manage) there's simply the ongoing question of 'sovereign risk'.
Government agencies and corporate interests have no long term constraints governing the access, stewardship and ownership of your data. Nope. Everyone cites standards/conventions from consultancy slide decks. None comply. Look at the track record.
They can't police corporate abuse and haven't the chops/skills to manage their own back yard. It's all outsourced. Same design problem. Keeps giving. That's not smart or objective. No.
There's enough consensus amongst influential geeks (Tim Berners Lee and now Tim Cook) supporting a 'distributed security model' beyond a field trial in UK health and Apple's FindMyPhone.
It's become a Thing, such that the only security model deemed fit for widespread applications like Contact Tracing is a distributed security architecture. Whoops.
SovereignSilo anticipates this step change, both at a technical and governance level. It's just a matter of time.
There's no future in pretending these databases are anything other than a bucket of other-people's-data. That's the past.
Feel free to contact us with any questions or insights. We're all ears.
