Last week my in-depth tour of the Portuguese healthcare system concluded with a robust discussion about the challenges that are similar and different in our two countries. Everyone in the room agreed that privacy concerns are a major handicap to collaboration and improving quality of care. In the U.S. it’s HIPPA, of course. In the EU, it’s called GDPR. Interestingly, we had a Silicon Valley investor/private equity partner on the trip with us, who explained that “blockchain” and “deep learning/artificial intelligence” are almost universally expected to deliver us from the data privacy prison we are currently in–just not yet. The idea is that this blockchain/AI revolution will allow data sets to “talk” to each other without actually sharing the data sets– therefore, no violation of privacy rules. It’s not quite a reality, but an amazing possibility that I will be following closely! This Forbes article does a good job explaining the basics of blockchain/AI.