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We Need Apple Pay for Medical Data
Apple Pay is an improvement over paying with a credit card, but only marginally.
What we really need is a better (faster and more secure) way to give someone your personal information.
The primary use case I can think of is filling out forms. Doctors’ offices. The DMV. Credit applications. Etc.
It especially sucks when there are multiple forms in a packet you’re filling out, and you have to fill them all out. Only, they ask for the same information (name, address, DOB, phone number, etc.) for each one.
This isn’t a rant about, “Medical technology should be digial.”, which is true of course. It’s about using the technology that we now have to make the process better for users.
How it should work
Let’s use Apple Pay as an example, because it’s one I’m familiar with. In this scenario you have cards that you can call up and pay with by just getting near the Apple Pay reader.
Well, imagine you have one card that is medical data. Maybe it looks like the insurance card you’re given by your provider. When you are asked to fill out paperwork here’s what happens:
You pull up your medical card within your device or watch interface
You have your various fields already filled out
You click on the fields to toggle them as enabled or disabled
Once you’re happy with which fields you want to share, you bring it close to the reader just like when you pay for something
Medical companies can buy little readers, like the Square ones, or like the Apple Pay readers that are about to come out.
So in one quick motion you have saved like 10-20 minutes on paperwork. And companies can avoid the issue of storing and destroying written records full of PII.
Apple Pay for medical records.
This isn’t something we kind of need. We need it a lot. The current system is antiquated and ridiculous.
Notes
This really is means Apple Pay for exchanging personal data in general, but medical is a prime candidate.
I wrote about something similar here.