Who owns the health information?

• the patient to whom it refers?
• the health provider who created it?
• the IT specialist who has the greatest control over it?
• the researcher who aggregates it?
• the health 2.0 company that harvested it?

the notion of ownership is inadequate for health information. No one has an absolute right to destroy health information. But we all understand what it means to own an automobile: You can drive the car you own into a tree or into the ocean if you want to. No one has the right to do things like that a "master copy" of health information.

This is my most-quoted article about how silly it is to think of "owning" healthcare data.