Privacy by Design: Why Healthcare Data Needs a Digital Disguise

Source Domain: vocal.media

The modern physician possesses an unfortunate tendency to cure the body while entirely exposing the soul, or what is now worse, the medical record. To have one’s appendix removed is a vulgar necessity, but to have one’s internal architecture displayed to the public gaze is an absolute tragedy.

Medical science has advanced with a rapidity that is positively alarming, transforming the mysteries of human anatomy into transparent digital files. These pictures of the inner self, once guarded by the sacred silence of the hospital vault, now wander through the ether with the casual freedom of society gossip.

There is a terrible modern desire to know everything about everyone, and the medical industry has surrendered to this curiosity with an enthusiasm that lacks both wit and discretion. A patient is no longer a person of exquisite complexity, but a collection of pixels, a series of graphs, and a beautifully rendered skeletal structure awaiting an audience.

The medical establishment appears to believe that knowledge justifies any indiscretion, which is precisely the sort of error one expects from individuals who spend their lives staring into microscopes. Protection of the individual demands a rapid intervention, a deliberate veil thrown over the stark realities of the clinical file.

The Necessity of the Secret

A clinical record stripped of its mystery is as uninteresting as a romance that ends happily in the first chapter. The world seems to have forgotten that some things are beautiful precisely because they are hidden, and that the modern appetite for data is a sign of a very advanced state of intellectual decay.

Medical imaging has an extraordinary capacity to heal, yet it also invites an unwanted intimacy from strangers who have no business with the state of another person’s liver. The transmission of these files across the networks of the world requires an artistic compromise between the demands of science and the preservation of dignity.

Of course, it is…

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