The Case for a Data Bank
Saravanan Raju, Vandita Rajesh, Jitender S. Deogun · 2017
There are numerous initiatives undertaken by the community of nations to promote social inclusion by making healthcare and education accessible. With increasing human population and diminishing civil resources, there is an acute need for an entity that can deliver substantial improvement in both the scope and quality of these services. For such an entity to make informed decisions, it is vital to accumulate and assess data that is continuous and complete. However, the prevalent system of data curation is atomistic resulting in policy decisions often based on point-in-time data. Additionally, most of this data resides with the industrial complex and governmental entities, and rarely with the individual citizen and civil society. Hence, it is essential to institutionalize a holistic approach to data management, which conjointly meets the requirements of all stakeholders. In this paper, we present a brief of our ongoing research to design such an institution in the form of a data bank using blockchain technology to govern healthcare and education.