What Should Happen to our Medical Records When We Die?

By Jon Cornwall

In the next 200 years, at least 20 billion people will die. A good proportion of these people are going to have electronic medical records, and that begs the question: what are we going to do with all this posthumous medical data? Despite the seemingly logical and inevitable application of medical data from deceased persons for research and healthcare both now and in the future, the issue of how best to manage posthumous medical records is currently unclear.

Presently, large medical data sets do exist and have their own uses, though largely these are data sets containing ‘anonymous’ data. In the future, if medicine is to deliver on the promise of truly ‘personalized’ medicine, then electronic medical records will potentially have increasing value and relevance for our generations of descendants. This will, however, entail the public having to consider how much privacy and anonymity they are willing to part with in regard to information arising from their medical records. After all, enabling our medical records with the power to influence personalized medicine for our descendants cannot happen without knowing who we, or our descendants, actually are.  Read More