Tuesday, March 12, 2013

An Argument for Sharing Medical Data

A very interesting TED talk on pooling medical data.


With an interesting comment at 4:49 on how patient consent methods now have unintended consequences:
That was 70 years ago, and the way we gain informed consent, this tool that was created to protect us from harm, now creates silos. So the data that we collect for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's trials goes into silos where it can only be used for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's research. Right? It can't be networked. It can't be integrated. It cannot be used by people who aren't credentialed.