Understanding your health data, simply
A health datum isn't only your medical record. Here, in plain terms, is what it is — and why the law protects it so strongly.
When people say “health data”, they think of the doctor's file. In reality it's much broader: any information that tells something about your health, even outside of care.
Two words not to confuse
Produced within care.
- a diagnosis
- a prescription
- a test result
Anything that reveals your health, even outside care.
- the steps on a watch
- a pharmacy purchase
- an online search
What counts as health data
Why it's sensitive
This data says intimate things: an illness, a treatment, a vulnerability. Misused, it can be used to target, sort or exclude you (insurance, employment…). That's why it has reinforced protection.
Health data is never trivial: it speaks of you at the moment you are most vulnerable.
What Vertical Health Data does
Vertical Health Data builds common frameworks around care pathways. But VHD does not collect, host or process any of your data, and gives no medical advice. This page explains; it asks nothing of you.
Vertical Health Data does not collect, host or process any individual health data. The collection of personal health data would be conditional on HDS-certified hosting, which is not in place; it therefore does not take place.