Getting to the Patient Cloud and Guardian Angels

It’s been an exciting 2016 already in the realm of cloud computing and patient engagement. As I was preparing for the HIMSS16 conference, I was reflecting on how things are moving so quickly with the addition of new technologies and yet some of the core challenges around gathering the information to provide better medicine are still in the dark ages. So here is the question ringing in my head for this year at HIMSS…
How much longer must we wait to finally have a ‘patient cloud’ – a sharable and relatively complete cloud based health record for each patient?
This is seemingly an obvious prerequisite condition so that providers can deliver better care for patients. The patient controlled medical record is an old idea that goes back to the Guardian Angel manifesto published in 1994 at the dawn of the Internet era and yet 22 years later we have haven’t achieved the first steps of the fundamental core of a universal life long patient record.