[kdtop]

U.S. doctor here. I think "ownership" is not the correct way of thinking about this. I would argue that "access" is the better concept. If a dentist creates an xray in his office, then she should have access to the image to be able to prove that she provide standard-of-care treatment should claims of malpractice be leveled. A patient of this dentist should also have ready access to this as it is their body and their information. And perhaps an insurance company may require that they have the right to access the image and ensure the dentist is no submitting fraudulent charges. And many more examples could be created. Throw in privacy considerations adds yet another wrinkle. Again, I think "ownership" or "copyright" is not the best concept.

[zabaki]

Hi kdtop. I really appreciate your input, and I believe that both “right to access”, “ownership to data” and “copyright” are 3 different concepts that are fairly interesting.

Speaking from a health tech product manager perspective, then it has been interesting to see how must patient data was stored on local servers that the doctor purchased, and had stored at their clinic.

One could argue, that since the doctor owns the server, wrote the data, then the doctor might also be the “owner” of the data.

That does not mean the patients shouldnt have _access_ to the data, but traditionally then it was much harder, to get access to that data.

With more services going online, the data is no longer stored on servers the doctor purchased, and even though the doctors (or the clinic) created the data, ownership might not be as easy to pin point.

If journal notes (aka patient data) is copyrighted by the clinic, then the patient has no “right” to create copies of their medical data, nor do they have any right to share their medical data with others.

In part, i agree with you that “access” is a important consideration, but it is ideally important for patients to understand if their medical data is copyright protected, as that limits the patients ability to legally share information about their medical history.

[Teever]

At the end of the day property rights and the legal system deciding who has property rights are the way we solve all problems.

I understand that there are complexities in these medical scenarios that aren't common place but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that we can't apply traditional ownership ideas to medical records.

[bee_rider]

I think this depends on how generalized and expansive you consider "traditional ownership ideas" to be. As GP notes, multiple people have different stakes in these documents. For example, the patient has privacy concerns which must be a pretty high priority, the doctor has a need to do business.

This can exist in our legal system of course, in the sense that the legal system can host arbitrarily complicated licenses and contracts, but it isn't obvious (to me at least) that this is the best framework.