Hi Ali,

This is an interesting topic. I think there is two parts to this and that is how the issue should be addressed.

There is part one which is about Data Protection and privacy and you can't blame anyone for being alarmed at Google having access to 50 million patient records... the company literally has "made a living" out of having people giving up private data for convenience (including the email I am typing 😊)

The second part is what technology can do for healthcare (or really any other sector - education, registration of births and deaths) - being able to digitize all our multiple identities including identification, health records and associating this with other records such as land registry records, tax records, criminal records, school records, business ownership records) - the ability to store all this massive amounts of data in the cloud and manipulate it and learn from it (machine learning, A.I etc) holds great potential to improve lives of citizens... actually improve is an understatement - transformation is more appropriate.

But all this system of digitization of paper, digitalization of process should be led by someone who can be held accountable to citizens - in normal nations this would be the government. Having an entity like Google or Ascencion do the hard work means we have to be prepared to pay the price... same story having Mastercard do Huduma Number.

Then the final and ultimate step is that while government will be involved in all of the expense and resourcing (all the computing resources need for learning and storage should be gov. owned) the final ultimate step is that the citizen holds the keys and permission to use their data. E.g you would get a notification saying C.I.D are requesting access to your bank or tax data - or you would get a request when the building you enter make a request to receive a visual confirmation that the image their system has captured of you matches the name you gave them - and you would be asked how long they were to hold this data (1 hour, 1 day) - citizen empowerment to control and share their data is the ultimate data protection... empowerment only happens with adequate user education and open and simple user agreements.

Example of a bad way to digitize was the first attempt at "Huduma number" - ultimatums and deadlines to the holders of data is not a good place to start... a good place to start is to ask yourself "What do I already know about the entity (human being) whose records I am trying to unify and digitize... and then work with that.

- Oops I guess I went off topic. That is my ten cents on the matter.
With kind regards


Jeipea

Believe in yourself then you can change your world

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On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 8:34 AM Ali Hussein via kictanet <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

Listers 


In the recent past cries of outrage have been heard from all corners of the world on issues related to privacy and the power of BigTech over our lives. 


Now BigTech is venturing into Healthcare with various initiatives from AI to how the healthcare ValueChain can be improved to bring down costs and make it more efficient.


Google’s latest forays into @Healthcare is raising a lot of eyebrows. Are we becoming too cautious at the expense of possible groundbreaking innovation? What can we do to ensure we don’t throw the baby with the bath water? 


https://local12.com/news/nation-world/privacy-or-innovation-googles-access-to-patient-health-records-sparks-controversy


Ali Hussein
+254 0713 601113 

Twitter: @AliHKassim

Skype: abu-jomo

LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim


"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."  ~ Aristotle


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