[3] Prof. Phillip Windley, former Chief Information Officer of the State of Utah, noted the positive impact that HIE of One could have on privacy and consent.
[4] A proposal[5] for using HIE of One in conjunction with blockchain technology, was reviewed by the US Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), which awarded it for being innovative, viable, and significant.
[6] The project rests on the premise that patients should authorize the sharing of their health data, instead of leaving these decisions up to hospitals and other healthcare providers who offer generic and opaque disclosure forms.
HIE of One, in contrast, dispenses with these middlemen by allowing each patient to direct the data flow using an automated policy-driven authorization server.
Data sharing is carried out through protocols run by the patient and the people to whom she wishes to grant access (doctors, clinical researchers, family members, etc.).
HEART grew out of a pair of meetings at the MIT Media Lab in 2014 designed to charter work on adding a healthcare-specific authorization layer to a RESTful API.