Your Life, Your Health explores the American patient experience and seeks to transform it through a proposal of to build an historic National Health Outcomes Research Data Sharing Network. When businessman and philanthropist Joe Kanter was diagnosed with prostate cancer he went to multiple specialists and asked each of them the same question: Based on the real-world experiences of other patients like me, which treatment option is likely to work best for me? None of these doctors could answer specifically; each could only offer Kanter recommendations based on his or her own anecdotal experiences, rather than on hard scientific evidence. Kanter came to recognize that the most underutilized resources in healthcare are the patients ourselves and the data from our collective health experiences. Frustrated by his own patient experience, Kanter started the Joseph H. Kanter Family Foundation (KFF) to work to ensure that one day patients will no longer face the most important decisions of their lives in an information vacuum. Your Life, Your Health proposes a Learning Health System that, for the first time in history, promises to leverage anonymized data captured in electronic health records as a byproduct of delivering care, to enable us to learn from the collective anonymized experiences of millions of patients over time. It holds the key to unlocking the potential of the best and the brightest researchers by providing them with anonymous and secure information on the real-world health experiences of millions of patients. In turn, such a system would unleash the power of clinicians, and ultimately patients, to make better informed health decisions. Your Life, Your Health will illuminate the path to improving health, saving lives, revolutionizing medical research, redefining the patient experience, and transforming our health system.
