NHC Member Spotlight: digi.me

By: Kelly Garrity, NHC Senior Director, Membership Services and Development

Having the right data in the right place at the right time is one of the greatest challenges facing most health ecosystems. With each patient’s data currently scattered across many silos and fragmented around different health providers, it is an immense challenge for most organizations and one which has yet to be resolved.

Yet in an increasingly data-driven world and with the rise of technologies such as AI, the need to address the privacy and transparency challenges of managing, sharing, and exploiting data has never been greater.

Digi.me, a new member of the National Health Council, is on a mission to create a decentralized world where data is controlled by people for their own benefit. It wants to do this using its unique market-leading technology, which is inspired by the concept of Patient Centricity.

Patient Centricity is the philosophy of empowering individuals through technology, putting them at the center of their own care by returning their data to them. The premise is based on the fact that only the individual knows where all their data is held across all their life and has the necessary relationships with the organizations who hold it.

Digi.me’s platform enables individuals to gather all of their personal data including social media, financial, medical records, wearable, and devices into a secure, normalised, personal library, which they own and control. Individuals can then share their data with chosen third party applications and services, using digi.me’s unique Consent Access API.

Iceland was the first country in the world to open up a national citizen-facing health record API to enable individuals to download their data in to digi.me. This has created a nationwide living lab environment enabling innovation through citizens being given access to a broad range of their data.

Digi.me allowing Icelandic citizens to download their own health data in world first

This approach empowers individuals with all their data and enables industry innovators to offer engaging services directly to individuals like never before, using fully consented access to richer, wider, longitudinal data while maintaining maximum privacy and security.

In all of this, digi.me remains a neutral broker and never sees touches or holds the individual’s data.

Two of the key drivers for digi.me have been the recent GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe which has given individuals greater rights to access their data in electronic and reusable formats and US Meaningful Use 3 (MU3) which has required patient access to data. Globally, there is generally a trend towards patient empowerment.

Since starting out in Iceland, digi.me has connected to over 150 health care providers in the US, with support for various standards including Epic and Cerner APIs. It is continuing to add to these as MU3 capabilities are adopted and will shortly be announcing the first access to NHS data for UK citizens.

Like the NHC, digi.me is person centric. Digi.me’s core values and mission align closely with those of the NHC, enabling collaboration with integrity and transparency and re-aligning the balance of power to give patients greater agency over their data and wider health and care.

Digi.me as a company works with partners to enable them to do more with personal data, working across all sectors but with particular interest in health care payers, providers, pharma, research, industry, and innovators many of which are members of the NHC.

Through working with organizations such as the NHC, digi.me hopes to bring together the health community to enable the next generation of health and care.

To find out more or to become a digi.me partner please contact Dan Bayley, Vice President of Health, at dan@digi.me.

For information on how your organization can become a member of the NHC, contact me.