Giving Compass' Take:

• Data makes patient-centered medical treatment possible, but a lack of trust can prevent data from flowing efficiently between providers to create the best care. 

• How can funders help to facilitate the secure flow of data? Should patents trust that their data will be safe? 

• Learn more about patient health data. 

The wealth of data now being produced and collected about patients has often been held up as the holy grail to push forward innovation within the healthcare system.

The logic follows that with the move to electronic medical records, increasing consumer adoption of technologies like genomics testing and wearables, better decisions could be made to help improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.

When it comes to why this wholesale transformation hasn’t happened yet, more often than not technical issues – like the perennial boogeyman of interoperability — comes up as the answer.

But a panel at a provider symposium held at Health 2.0 in Santa Clara, California honed in on a much more fundamental issue to solve: the building of trust among the stakeholders in the healthcare system.

The lack of trust in turn leads to data asymmetry between providers, payers, and patients and the inability to unlock all the potential of the accumulating information.

Anne Wellington, the managing director of the Cedar-Sinai Accelerator said complete transparency between patient and health insurers is difficult because of a lack of alignment around incentives.

Read the full article about a lack of trust by Kevin Truong at MedCity News.