Oh this is awesome. I always wished there would be something like this along the lines of blood tests. Keep an anonymous public database of blood tests results with known diagnosis of the patient, age, ethnicity, global region, etc and publish it out. Can be completely anonymous and people would basically just get an immutable entry every time they have a blood test over their lifetime with whatever the dataset happened to be that day.
Would be an excellent way to mine for commonalities among different conditions. I just assumed there was already something like that, but private. Seems like it would enable fairly significant study.
Why don't they have a public, encrypted database where anyone can use their private key to sign certificates authorizing providers to post information about them, and the providers sign it with their certificates also? So you can share (some of) your health history with anyone you want to, but otherwise it would be anonymous and private??
I've often asked your first question, and I think the answer is because it's just not simple for an ordinary person. The public benefit is obvious, but it'd have to be decentralized and the technology for that just isn't easy enough for most people to use.
Due to the nature of genetic information, it can never be really anonymous if you are genotyping genome size amounts of host DNA. There is simply too much data to anonymize it's provenance.
Microbiome is generally anonymous because you can filter out host DNA from it. Though, I bet you could still trace it back to an individual if you tried.
Would be an excellent way to mine for commonalities among different conditions. I just assumed there was already something like that, but private. Seems like it would enable fairly significant study.