– Written by the Digi.me team –
Our personal data is a vast and ever-growing resource that each of us adds to every day as we live, work, socialise and play in an increasingly online world.
This data has enormous potential – to fuel innovation, to transform and improve all our lives, as well as help create more personalised products and services.
Yet researchers and businesses are only ever able to see a thin slice of the available data, despite this explosion in the amount generated. This is because this data – created by us, about us – is siloed where it is generated, unable to be reused or shared elsewhere.
Digi.me exists to overcome this problem and was founded on a vision of empowering individuals with their own data.
We have always understood that unlocking the full power and potential of personal data requires decentralising it, returning control to those who created it in the first place and allowing them to share it on their own terms, in exchange for relevant and personalised services and products.
The benefits of this consented data sharing can be transformative, not only for individuals or businesses, but for society as a whole.
Take health, for example. Putting individuals at the heart of their health records and treatments, known as patient centricity, has huge benefits for personalised treatment plans, as well as increasing efficiency and decreasing costs for health services worldwide. Digi.me is already helping enable health data sharing across the world, in the UK, Iceland, the Netherlands and the United States, and is working on further opportunities.
A world based on harnessing the opportunity of consented data sharing opens up so many opportunities for apps and services to be built on a backbone of respecting personal data. Indeed, many businesses and organisations in the health and finance sectors, to give just two examples, are already building services based on digi.me to do just that.
But there is so much more that can be done; the possibilities truly are endless. And the benefits of consented data sharing are not only myriad, but there for the taking today.
Researchers, businesses and governments being permitted to unlock the full power of personal will create a better world for us all. Consent-enabling mechanisms such as digi.me already exist to make this possible – and we are doing everything we can to make empowered individuals sharing their data with consent the basis of a new economy which will benefit every single one of us.
