> I'm willing the accept the 5% extra chance of death entailed by some emergency doctor not knowing my medical history.

That seems logical in theory, but in practice, that is not actually how this kind of thing works. I know firsthand: I ultimately survived a series of differing and often unusual medical crises in my 20s, that I really should not have ultimately survived, individually or collectively, statistically speaking. I never actually pictured myself once, after turning age 18, ever being age 30. I never once believed that I would ever be 30, in my adult life. Now, every year after 30 to me is a gift.

If you do not think that something like this can happen to you: 7-8% of the general population collectively has some sort of a rare disease. Rare diseases can look exactly like a small collection of different common health problems that people with chronic illnesses may legitimately regularly acquire. It requires a lot of intuition, knowledge, experience, and foresight to actually get something like this right. This requires medical expertise and being an excellent clinician is essential. This is not a problem that software engineers can solve on their own.

Also, medical records are almost always littered with a ton of errors, that may seem minor to you, but in reality, they really are not. Considering the third leading cause of death in the US is considered to be preventable medical errors [1], which is appalling, you better being going through your medical records in detail, correcting each and every error (along with sharing the records--by giving physical copies--for security reasons--to the other provider--if they do not have full access to complete health records), if you plan on staying alive long-term, whether you are healthy or not.

We have a tremendous way to go on medical records and medical data, and it is really not something that AI can practically solve, in general, due to so many errors, bad datasets, and profound hoarding of data.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/03/4766361...

Why do you think you're informed enough to know what doctors need to know about your medical history to best treat you?

It seems pretty common sense that the main things people want to convey in medical emergencies where they're unconscious or their identity is unknown are allergies and reactions, hence why we have medical allergy bracelets and similar things.

If it's life and death and I'm unconscious, it's unlikely they would be able to access my medical records regardless, given the state of healthcare data interoperability (I have a lot of experience in this area). If I am conscious, I can tell them where to get my records, whether they're in Random Hospital X's database, or my personal DB.

I tend to agree that in the average case there's no real downside to doctors not having my medical history.

You have some weird and contradictory views here.

You admit that medical bracelets are a good thing. But then you go off and say stuff like "it's unlikely they would be able to access my medical records regardless". What? It's not "regardless". We can fix that. That's the point of this thread branch.

I wish. You haven’t dealt with EHRs I take it. Try it sometime versus greenfield development and you’ll share my “weird” views as you put it.

During the mid-aughts, there was at least one serious proposal that every person would have their own private record store, which they carried around (PDFs on a thumb drive). Part of NHIN shootout. Every one had a pretty good laugh.

Repeating myself here: one way to protect patient privacy is to issue everyone globally unique identifiers. Then use translucent database techniques to hide the important.

Currently, linking records across our heterogeneous systems, with all the data quality challenges, prevents data from being encrypted (in transit or at rest).