Your Life Your Health: Sharing Your Digital Health Data Could Save Your Life

Your Life, Your Health explores the American patient experience and seeks to transform it through a proposal to build a historic National Health Outcomes Research Data Sharing Network. When Joe Kanter was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he asked multiple specialists the same question: "Based on the real-world experiences of other patients like me, which treatment option is likely to work best for me?" None could answer specifically; each could only offer recommendations based on anecdotal experiences, rather than on hard scientific evidence. Frustrated by his own patient experience, Kanter started the Joseph H. Kanter Family Foundation (KFF) to ensure that one day, patients will no longer face the most important decisions of their lives in an information vacuum. "Your Life, Your Health" proposes a Learning Health System that, for the first time in history, promises to leverage anonymized data captured in electronic health records as a by-product of delivering care, to enable us to learn from the collective experiences of millions of patients over time.