Health+: Empowering Individuals via Unifying Health Data
This addresses the challenge for individuals, especially those with limited technical expertise, in managing scattered health data across incompatible systems, though it is a vision paper without implementation results.
The paper tackles the problem of fragmented personal health data management by proposing Health+, a user-centric system that enables individuals to upload, query, and share multimodal health data, aiming to empower patients with control over their records.
Managing personal health data is a challenge in today's fragmented and institution-centric healthcare ecosystem. Individuals often lack meaningful control over their medical records, which are scattered across incompatible systems and formats. This vision paper presents Health+, a user-centric, multimodal health data management system that empowers individuals (including those with limited technical expertise) to upload, query, and share their data across modalities (e.g., text, images, reports). Rather than aiming for institutional overhaul, Health+ emphasizes individual agency by providing intuitive interfaces and intelligent recommendations for data access and sharing. At the system level, it tackles the complexity of storing, integrating, and securing heterogeneous health records, ensuring both efficiency and privacy. By unifying multimodal data and prioritizing patients, Health+ lays the foundation for a more connected, interpretable, and user-controlled health information ecosystem.