Medical Snapshot System

The Medical Snapshot System is a way to improve medical systems using IT systems to isolate patients and staff from information that would trigger an ethical review. In 2007 when I first developed this concepts were new in clinical context and the technologies were experimental. Now in 2024 the clinical technology is much more mature and the legal and ethical debate is becoming mainstream. Law and ethics are a big part of this, and the emerging EU concept of Personal Data Donation deals with GDPR rights, the psychology of donating data, special cases of post-mortem medical data, and more. My Medical Snapshot System is enabled by the data donation concept.

The Medical Snapshot concept controls the timing and direction of information flows. This concept has been used for centuries when sequestering a jury , where time is seemingly stopped for the jury. A more complicated version of the same idea is how Reversible Computers work.

See the Full Snapshot proposal version 4.1 here. I have version 5 in progress.

I have qualitatively validated the concept in discussion with patients, medical systems researchers, doctors and nurses. More formally, risk modelling should be used, which is what I am developing in my work at the University of Southampton.

The next step is to secure partners for a trial in a real-life medical system, which can be done in a simulation environment using Chinese Walls / Ethical Walls. There are plenty of organisations with incentive to participate, starting with the patients who stand to benefit, and including manufacturers of medical monitoring devices.

As to technology, since 2007 huge progress has been made towards tricorder-like technology first imagined in 1966. Today insulin levels can be measured from body sweat, LED laser photonics can detect many viral and bacterial infections, and there are handheld devices on the market offering reasonably accurate genomic results. All of this supports the basic premise of the Medical Snapshot System.

The completely separate Not Before Time service is highly relevant as a potential secure information delivery mechanism with time-locked dates defined by the results of ethical analysis.