The founder of the World Wide Web may have come up with an answer for one of the NHS’s biggest challenges: how to give people some control of their medical data while making sure it can be shared with all of the doctors and other healthcare workers who need it. For two years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been working on an idea called Solid, a web platform that allows users to store their data in what is called a Personal Online Data Store – or Pod, according to BBC News. Far from just being an academic project, the technology behind this platform is being developed by a company called Inrupt with some major venture capital backers. Now Inrupt and its chief technology officer Sir Tim have announced what he calls a major milestone – the release of its technology in the form of the Solid Server, with a handful of clients already piloting possible use cases. These include NatWest Bank, the BBC, the government of the Belgian region of Flanders – and the NHS. Sir Tim says Solid is “going to drive groundbreaking new opportunities that not only restore trust in data but also enhance our lives
This has most of the necessary elements in place to make it a groundbreaking answer to storing extremely sensitive and private data – but there are still a couple of fine details missing. Having Tim Berners-Lee at the helm it will no doubt add gravity to the project, as there aren’t many people who understand the internet better than someone who created the world wide web.
However, there are some standards needed to be ironed out first, such as the way the digital data is shared. Much like end-to-end encryption, the information is very secure while it is in transition or when it is just stored online. However, at both ends of the data transfer, i.e. the patient and the doctor, the data only has the protection of the device it is on. Therefore, we will still need to encourage good passcode awareness and device security for this to be ultra-secure.