Digital Trust is Key to Driving Innovation, Saving Lives in Modern Healthcare

Do you trust your doctor?

If you’re in the Netherlands, the answer is probably yes. Dutch people trust doctors more than most, and the country is second only to Italy as the EU Member State with the highest level of confidence in medical advice. Much of that trust comes from a long-standing culture of relationship-based care, where patients see the same family doctor for decades.

Nowadays, though, healthcare looks a little different. Care comes from many sources, and data is being generated left and right, all over the place.

You have General Practitioners collecting data in their local practice, administrators collecting data in their hospitals, insurers collecting data for their risk assessments, researchers collecting data from clinical trials, policymakers aggregating data at a population level to make decisions that affect everyone, and patients themselves accumulating and using health data from apps, wearables, and other devices.

In this era of immense data collection, trust may feel a little more fragile—and “trust me, I’m a doctor” may not carry the same weight as it once did.

The future of healthcare is already here

We can already take advantage of a plethora of digital technologies to help gather, track, and analyze health trends and treatment outcomes, all for the public good.

Your smartwatch can track how often you walk or cycle toward your wellness goals. Your father can monitor his glucose levels and transmit the metrics to a physician from his smartphone. Your neighbor can worry less about her heart health, since her implant is automatically sending alerts to her cardiologist in real time.

We have smart beds that monitor patient movements to prevent falls, robots for surgical procedures, and AI making accurate predictions about future events based on vast amounts of historical data—the list goes on.

When it comes to the value of these technologies, we’re only just starting to scratch the surface.

Personal sensor data, for example, is expected to grow from 10% of all stored information to 90% within the next decade. Imagine the leap forward if doctors could access all of this data as insights—a narrative about the patient—and use it to make proactive recommendations to improve individual health outcomes. We’d prevent unnecessary hospital visits and fast-track patients to support much sooner, cutting healthcare costs in the process.

Zoom out to a population of millions, and the potential for life-saving care is tremendous. If public health leaders can collect and share all the data that’s circulating, then predicting the effects of pandemics could become a reality. Likewise, the impact of seasonal outbreaks and the risk patterns for chronic diseases. Health leaders would be able to see which populations are most at risk and take hyper-targeted action to protect them.With healthcare budgets creaking under the strain of an aging population, the shift toward smarter medicine couldn’t come at a better time. Older individuals will account for nearly a third of Europe’s population by 2050. Frankly, we need to shift the emphasis from reactive treatments to scalable, preventive care, so overburdened healthcare systems have more resources to care for those who need it the most.

But can I trust healthcare data?

IFor all that the healthcare system needs the benefits of data and technology, neither providers nor patients will use it if they don’t trust it.

Here’s the tricky part from the patient’s perspective: People are strongly protective of their data. Our medical history is part of the story of our lives. Patients hear about data breaches all the time and worry that their most intimate health information could be exposed. Or worse, exploited for commercial gain.

A 2023 study from the European Consumer Organisation shows the state of public sentiment. While a majority of respondents (61%) said they were happy for their health records to be shared for care purposes, less than one in five was willing to share their data with pharmaceutical companies (17%), and less than one in 10 was willing to share their health data with insurance companies or companies developing wellness apps (8%).

According to the study’s authors: “The results show that consumers’ willingness to share their health data with an entity reflects the level of trust they have in that entity.”

Trust is also crucial for healthcare professionals, and they have additional concerns. Data in its raw form can be a messy beast, filled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. To rely on the data for decision-making, practitioners must be confident it is accurate and consistent. They need to know that it belongs to the patient and not someone else, and is fully traceable through every step of its transmission process. Only then will the data be useful as a diagnostic tool, yielding clean and error-free results.

While they may not explicitly use the phrase, what everyone is asking for here is digital trust. When digital trust is present, patients have the confidence to share their data and professionals have the confidence to use it. Trust has to be there if society is to unlock all the benefits of personalized medicine and improve health outcomes for millions of people.

So how do you ensure trust in the data that’s being collected, so it can be used to its full potential?

Putting your data in good health

When it comes to delivering trust, legislation is the obvious place to start. Already, the medical sector is subject to a raft of EU healthcare data security compliance legislation that seeks to protect IT systems from accidental data exposure and cyber attacks. Of these, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services Regulation (eIDAS), and the soon-to-be-implemented NIS2 Directive are at the forefront.

These laws address different things: The GDPR concerns personal data, eIDAS focuses on electronic identities and signatures, and NIS2 deals with network security. Each framework is a great leap forward in ensuring the safety and integrity of patient data within the healthcare ecosystem. Fundamentally, though, they view security through a relatively narrow lens: Putting a lock on the vault of people’s data to keep it safe from prying eyes.

But here’s the thing: Even before data gets to the vault, there are a lot of opportunities for it to be mixed up, exposed, or compromised. This means you cannot just think in terms of security and compliance—you have to guarantee the quality of the data inside the vault as much as the security of the vault itself.

Take trackers, for example. When a patient wears a health monitoring device to track their oxygen or blood pressure, the device might use data protection encryption management as a ‘lock’ to protect the raw data from tampering or theft. That’s good baseline security. But how do you know if the data being encrypted is accurate and belongs to the right person?

You don’t—unless you integrate additional information. Details such as sensor origin, user identity, location, and measurement time are critical to bridge the gap between simply collecting data and gaining insights that can help us anticipate disease patterns and tailor care on a mass scale.

Case study: Trust in action

For healthcare leaders looking to benefit from the explosion of data, including self-generated health and lifestyle data, the good news is that healthcare solutions available today can build the necessary elements of trust into your data sets.

The Public Key Infrastructure cryptosystem, for example, provides an end-to-end chain of trust so that identities can be verified across the growing Internet of Things. Digital certificates, which act like passports, ensure that users, entities, and devices within the ecosystem are who they claim to be. PKI acts as a root of trust for the millions of ‘things’ that are gathering health data, ensuring that data exchanges between them are secure and time-stamped.

Our recent work with Zorg-ID shows just how valuable this level of trust can be.

Built from AET Europe’s ConsentID framework and operating through the mandatory health insurance scheme in the Netherlands, the Zorg-ID app enables approved healthcare providers to access patient data and digitally sign documents.

We developed Zorg-ID with current and future regulatory compliance in mind, modernizing healthcare data-sharing to overcome technical obstacles and enhance data access. Its advanced encryption and two-factor authentication ensure privacy, with seamless interoperability across the multiple stakeholders in the Dutch healthcare system.

Zorg-ID has now been adopted by 80% of Dutch healthcare providers, facilitated 2.75 million user authentications, and handled 30 million document signatures. The platform’s availability rate is 99.982%, guaranteeing secure and reliable access to healthcare data.

To give an on-the-ground example: A paramedic attending a patient with chest pain can’t tell if the person in front of them has a history of a heart condition just by looking at them, or by asking them while they’re in such a high-stress condition. But with Zorg-ID on their smartphone, they can scan the patient’s ID and safely pull up their medical information. Instantly, they’ll see what condition(s) the patient is being treated for and what medications they’re using.

Solutions like this empower healthcare providers to make quicker, better-informed care decisions—and also save time and resources. If the paramedic decides that a condition can be managed safely on-site, for example, the patient may not need to be transported to a hospital.

Bottom line? Everyone wants better health outcomes with as few costs as possible. Trust is key to making this vision a reality. With trust running through ecosystems, the digital future of healthcare can achieve its promise of better resource allocation, better care delivery, and healthier populations.