These Startups Think We Need A Hippocratic Oath For The Digital Age


The Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced recently that the agency intends to rewrite healthcare privacy rules stating that, “the laws are decades-old and revamping them will help in the health care sector’s ongoing transition from paying for volume to value.” This is good news according to Dr. Deborah Peel, an internationally recognized expert on human rights for health privacy. We need a “Hippocratic Oath for the Digital Age,” says Peel. “Health digital data should require the same privacy protection that medical records received in the Paper Age: no information should be disclosed without full transparency and patient consent. Our current healthcare IT infrastructure and laws such as HIPAA are not enough. It’s time to extend the ethical traditions and trust doctors have applied to patient care for thousands of years into the new Digital Age.”

My Health Data HUB is a new working group within, an international data rights non-profit, to create a network of international doctors, non-profits, and startups to help direct development of privacy-responsible new healthcare technology. Here are five startups invited to participate in My Health Data HUB that are working to build new technology that will promote a “Hippocratic Oath for the Digital Age”:

CUBISMI, Madison, WI.  – Cubismi is a doctor-patient health data exchange platform that is augmenting doctors with super-precision insights from digital imaging to tailor data-driven precision care for each patient.   Cubismi is building a patient-doctor health data exchange platform that will work toward a new file type for medical imaging, a My Virtual Body One File (“One File”), which will be a vehicle for the new mapping features akin to a “Google Maps of the human body.”  The technology will deliver never-before seen insights from precision analytics and machine learning.  The One File will offer patients a new level of personal data access, control, and transparency, and will offer doctors new efficiencies, improved accuracy, and new intellectual capital for directing patient care.  The data file will be exchanged across the platform with doctors who will tailor the data and care decisions for each patient, thus optimizing data quality and outcomes.  As a doctor-led startup, Cubismi has taken a different path from most AI medical imaging startup and vendor solutions.  “The experience of being in the healthcare environment helped us design Cubismi’s solution in way that will be a win for patients, doctors, and healthcare systems,” says Dr. Schieke, a radiologist and the Founder of Cubismi. “We understand the importance of a well-designed platform that will protect medical ethics, patient rights, and assure the power of the health big data stays in the hands of people and their doctors.”

HEALTH COMPANION, San Diego, CA.  – Health Companion provides consumers and providers a simple, secure means of exchanging health records via the web, processes the data into a clinical summary. Algorithms working on the clinical summary then help people track their personal preventive measures from compiled recommendations from medical organizations such as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, American Cancer Society, and the CDC.  Health Companion also enables secure messaging between healthcare stakeholders, including consumers, doctors, healthcare organizations, payers, and employers.

 Located in San Diego, Health Companion was, in part, created by Dr. Murray Reicher, a physician and Radiologist with a proven track record for predicting successful future healthcare innovation. “It’s clear to me that significant improvements in the quality and cost of healthcare can come from consumers increasing their personal health knowledge and health accountability,” says Dr. Reicher.

HIE OF ONE, Watertown, MA and Austin, TX. - HIE of One (Health Information Exchange of One) uses blockchain technology to assure patient health data stays under the control of patients and doctors, even when a patient switches between healthcare systems.  The blockchain technology eliminates control by intermediary data brokers in healthcare, very similar to how blockchain eliminated the banking industry as intermediaries.   The technology uses free and open source software (FOSS) and public blockchains such as Ethereum to secure the credentials of the patient’s caregivers.  Building HIE of One using FOSS, open standards, and public blockchains are key features that can help eliminate the current practice of patient and doctor lock-in within large healthcare systems.  Preventing lock-in, in turn, will improve data access and interoperability, decrease associated fragmentation costs, and improve patient care.  “To explain HIE of One we use the analogy of churches,” says Dr. Adrian Gropper, CTO of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.  “People have the freedom to choose which congregation they will belong to and share a very personal part of their lives yet retain the freedom to switch churches seamlessly.  Similarly, with HIE of One, patients will have the ability to choose healthcare systems and seamlessly switch to new healthcare systems, all while assuring that control of their personal health data stays between them and their doctor.”

 Dr. Gropper has a proven track record as an entrepreneur in predicting future trends for healthcare IT and thinks the next frontier is technology that fully protects patients’ digital data privacy rights.

PARTICLE HEALTH, Brooklyn, NY - Particle Health uses blockchain technology to securely distribute consent and authorization information for research and insurance purposes. Their first product, a smart consent tool, is used to track and unlock patient information for life insurance underwriting and research. When a person wants to share their medical records in the U.S. today, they must authorize a redundant, expensive, manual process that typically takes 30-60 days to complete. This process is required for things like life insurance underwriting, research or just to share data with a new doctor. It is completed tens of millions of times per year - often by email or fax. “It wasn't until recently, with the emergence of blockchain technology, that record holders like hospitals or health information exchanges, felt comfortable enough trusting technology to automate this process - which is exactly why we started this company,” says Troy Bannister, Founder of Particle Health.

Particle Health is a trusted, shared ledger that puts the patient at the center of the authorization and consent workflow, moving away from the 'all-or-nothing' paper-based consent of today, to a granular, conditional, intelligent solution. They integrate into current databases without changing any workflow yet give every network member access to a real- time catalogue of permissions and the ability to access records. Bannister adds, “By converting consent and authorization into smart contracts, we can be incredibly secure in the way we exchange data while simultaneously tracking every transaction anonymously - building a trusted network that our health systems have been waiting for.”

ENIGMA, Boston, MA.  Enigma has created a technology to allow data sharing across multiple diverse stakeholders, such as hospitals, to collate big data and run complex analysis to gain insights, such as ways to detect early signs of disease, all while maintaining people’s proper access permissions and data privacy rights. The technology uses machine learning for encrypted blockchains to make it possible to do large scale analyses from big data without exposing personal data, including healthcare data. People can share their data while still keeping it separated from other people’s data, which keeps the data safe from outside parties.

“Legally, this system does not count as sharing data, as the data was not actually exchanged, yet we are able to run machine learning and glean powerful insights without ever exposing personal data or violating patient privacy rights,” says Dr. Sandy Pentland, Professor at the MIT Lab, which created Enigma. “Our vision is giving the data back to the people so they have full control over the personal data they produce and how it is being used.”New technology to best manage patients’ digital data is a critical need.  “Years ago, I realized that current technology we have for big data are hopeless in terms of security, but more importantly for privacy and data sharing,” said Pentland, who has been named one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world. 

Startups such as these are hard at work answering the call to assure patient digital data is exchanged and managed between doctors and patients in a trustworthy way, in keeping with a “Hippocratic Oath for the Digital Age.”  With these companies at the helm, the future will deliver.

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