Why should you care about your data? Well it’s the world’s most valuable resource first off. Information is truly priceless and the most sought after commodity of any business or organization. Right now everything you do produces data from what you browse online to having a medical emergency. Personal data is a huge market full of private information exploitation. The medical data market in itself is a multi billion dollar industry built on the backs of those suffering from health problems and medical expenses.

You should care about your data for many reasons. To name one, having oversight of its use is important given data can raise your insurance premiums. Data is used to develop products. While you suffer from health problems and medical expenses, the data extracted from you develops products to fix you that is often unaffordable. If none the less you should care as it could generate residual income. Owning your data is essentially owning a part of yourself.

Your information is floating around out there making money for someone else. Shouldn’t you get in on the sale of yourself atleast? As a patient, concerning yourself with your medical data is arguably one of the most important things you can do to get better care. Data and information in front if a patient could allow you to navigate healthcare and have a say in the type of medicines or therapies you receive. Healthcare shouldn’t be a cookie cutter process that patients are pushed through on a conveyor belt. Owning your data, as a patient could dramatically change the realm of Healthcare. Interoperability between electronic health record vendors and their various formats causes issues for handling patients medical information, if patients owned this information and had it tangibly themselves. Interoperability wouldn’t even be an issue.

Maybe you’re one of the 62% percent of bankruptcy filings from medical debt? Maybe medical expenses have you stressed? Maybe communication with your doctors could be better? Maybe you’d like some negotiating room on your insurance premiums? Maybe office wait times are an extra difficulty you have to endure for 45 minutes to hours? Data can help with all of these problems, if handled by the patients instead of only everyone else.

Everyone in healthcare is selling data from hospitals discharge records to electronic health record vendors, everyone but the patients who’re the main producers of that data being sold. It’s a complicated process. Doctors, medical staff, and underwriters are left with transcribing the data. Doctors often complain of problematic electronic health record user interface and claim it’s not worth the damper on their patient relationships typing half their meeting or extra clinic time with it. Electronic health record scribing is a huge issue for doctors, contributing heavily to burnout and some argue even suicide rates. Brokers buy the underwritten anonymized data and amass it to sell to anyone no questions asked, which is often purchased then cross referenced back to patients for controversial marketing purposes and even black market activity. For the wholesome data customers in medical research, they have to go through data brokers and often buy more data than they need in bulk. Insurance company’s trying to adjust costs with risk assessment don’t have a transparent means of doing it through data brokers, often leading to questionable ethics behind their processes with end results that lack a good grasp of their true cost margins or how to change them. Perpetuating the negative appeal for insurance company’s.

Healthcare is a bureaucracy composed of patients, doctors, business executives, marketers, budget analysts, lobbyists, politicians, and legislation. This makes a difficult world for patients to navigate through. Owning their data and having control over it could very well be the big platform for patients to collectively make their voices heard, navigate healthcare, and represent themselves in this giant industry and bureaucracy.

If we get patients selling their data and collectively organizing with each-other to develop a more structured data market, we can not only use the revenue to help patients curb medical expenses but also dramatically change the realm of healthcare by cutting out middlemen and inefficient processes handling your data. By giving patients total oversight and control of how their data is being used. By giving them the leverage of who has access to their valuable information, indefinitely controlling the market and holding the reigns as patients rightfully should in healthcare.

You should want to sell your data. Patients should have total control of how their data is used. This would give them negotiating space on care costs. This would allow them to have something to curb medical expenses. Owning their data could literally mean owning their health. Shouldn’t You be selling your medical data? Big business has no problem selling your data. It’s about time we start asking ourselves “How do I sell my medical data?”

To effectively do this we need to create a patient powered medical data brokerage. One that centers the patient through data ownership, paired with a relationship incentive platform that makes for efficient information extraction through the different sectors and organizations in healthcare. It’s not impossible to change healthcare, it’s just going to require a different type of sentiment than purely political policy and budgeting. Albeit those are important as well. However people will fix healthcare, not technology or laws.

Big data in healthcare is campaigned as the future and solve all solution for the industries shortcomings. While artificial intelligence and analytics has much to offer, big data won’t truly address the disconnect in healthcare that data ownership can. Big data in healthcare will need a patient centered approach to truly work. Otherwise it will just perpetuate cookbook medicine and continue the epidemic of “too much care.” Excessive and unnecessary care is considered by many a leading cause of cost rises. Without patient insight, big data and technology could worsen this issue.

Data is the worlds most valuable resource and medical data is of no exception, the medical data market alone is a growing multi-billion dollar one. It’s powered by extracting information from your medical records which is very private and sensitive information. Sometimes it uses that information for wholesome research. Sometimes it uses that information to raise your insurance premiums. Without you there in the process, there’s no regulation of its use.

Please, as a patient with medical issues or a person capable of being that patient. Think about taking the power of your data away from big business and using it to fix the industry in a more grass roots method. Only sell your data to company’s who create fairly priced products and practice fair trade. Above all, own your data to own your health.