The same could be said about electronic health record software generally.
Electronic healthcare data as a phenomenon isn't going anywhere; it will only get bigger, and individuals stand to benefit tremendously from this fact as it will make early diagnoses and getting the right care at the right time more likely.
Rather than panic when we find out that another company will be handling healthcare data, we need to set high standards for engineering, security, user consent, and privacy expectations for companies working in this area.
The specific concern raised in the parent comment is about healthcare data leaks.
In my view, every company handling healthcare data should be responsible for keeping that data safe and having proper consent, regardless of whether the software is paid for by doctors or by iPhone users.
>The specific concern raised in the parent comment is about healthcare data leaks.
Hacking electronic health record software requires hacking into data centres/cloud providers. Hacking this proposal merely requires hacking an iPhone.
Electronic health record software only stores data you wish to allow your health provider to discover. Apple and co. are (according to the article) thinking about automatic collection.
This proposal is dramatically more expansive than typical health records.
This is where consent comes into play. Today, a lot of people have already consensually downloaded their healthcare provider's patient portal app onto their mobile devices, so some subset of their doctor's EHR's data has already graced their mobile devices by their own consent, based on their own judgement of the risks involved. From the standpoint of electronic healthcare data merely existing on a device that could theoretically be hacked, having a consensual system like this on a mobile device would not break any new ground.
Edit: I also wouldn't assume that an iPhone is less secure than various computers and cloud servers that doctors use for their EHR software. This is where high engineering and security standards come into play.
Your previous deleted post compared hacking this to a constructive proof of P=NP. Are you kidding me?
>This is where consent comes into play.
Oh please. Having a buried setting isn't consent, since there are a million settings to disable. Besides, if and when these things are hacked, it's easy to turn on.
>Today, a lot of people have already consensually downloaded their healthcare provider's patient portal app
An automatic opt-out scanning system on a massive amount of phones, where all the data is in a standard place on a phone, isn't comparable to an unknown amount of people downloading unstructured data to their phones and keeping an unknown amount of it.
