Data Ethics in Healthcare

As a broad society we are part of the thing that we're metabolizing together is like, how do we deal with a world where our ability to generate, store, transmit information has grown to orders of magnitude than it ever has before? Right. And I think that creates a huge amount of value, creating power and opportunity. Right? Like the same reason we can listen to music or why we can make all scientific discoveries and all these things that like incredibly valuable, but then they can also be misused. And I think that's like one of these things where it's like, I think in some ways technology has no ethics, right? Like, technology just is, right? Like it's just kind of. And the ethics and the kind of come along with the frameworks and how people utilize it. For us in health care, we are dealing with some of the most sensitive personal data sets in people's lives in our envelope of data for each one of us. And so the way we think about it is like, historically, the framework around health data had been that it's housed in the filing cabinet of a doctor and sensitive, but it's in one filing cabinet. Then they put the filing cabinet to these EMRs. So it's like in a hospital. And in general, hospitals are actually, like, really bad at securing health data. It's just like, we don't have that impression just because they're distributed, but they're getting hacked all the time. But the question is, like, for the future, what is the right way to manage health data? One conviction that we have as a company is that the best way to do that is that treating it as you being the primary custodian of that data and operating with the principles of representing you, the individual, and treating the data as belonging to you. Because I think from our perspective, there are times where actually there's a lot of value that you have in the data being shared. And so we want to make that as easy as possible, but also we want to ensure that there's no use of the data that we make that would be counter your expectations. And so the way we think about it is, is this going to surprise someone in the negative way if data is used in any way? And so we try to go to very extreme lengths to ensure that we stick within the contract of expectations that people have of us. And again, it's like, it's not a perfect framework, but I think for us, that's been kind of, in general, like, one directionally very valuable way to think about it is like, it's your data, and our job is to use it in the way that you expect us to and to change your expectations as well. If we think there's a use that's important, we can help you modify your expectations, but that's the burden that we have to carry.