When a person comes to a hospital, what matters to them is that the doctor can see their test results, the front desk does not mix up appointments, the insurer receives the necessary information, and none of the examination results get lost. Most of us do not care how exactly these systems exchange data. Yet in practice, everything depends on it.
Medical records just became the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley. In a stunning 72-hour span this January, OpenAI and Anthropic launched competing platforms that transform fragmented health data into AI-powered personal health advisors, signaling a digital colonization of America’s healthcare system. While regulators spent a decade mandating interoperability through the 21st Century Cures Act, tech giants are exploiting the resulting data floodgates, deploying sophisticated language models to ingest, analyze, and monetize patient information at unprecedented scale.
Have we traded medical privacy for the convenience of conversational health intelligence?
The New Zealand government has launched a wide-ranging review of a cybersecurity incident that affected Manage My Health—one of the country’s most widely used platforms for managing electronic patient records. The attack may have exposed private information belonging to around 6–7% of the platform’s 1.8 million registered users and prompted an immediate response from the government and data-protection bodies.