After the EU's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) came into effect on May 25 this year, it will affect almost all industries.In the field of health and wellness, the management of patient data is about to change radically.On the one hand, the new regulations give patients more control over the collection and use of their personal data;On the other hand, non-compliance with relevant data can result in heavy fines of up to 20 million euros or 4% of turnover.After the implementation of GDPR, the health care sector will face the following changes.

　　First, personal data is more secure. Healthcare organizations must have a better understanding of how and where they collect patient information.Not only will electronic data be affected, it will also have an impact on paper records.According to the GDPR requirement, if a data breach occurs, it must be reported within 72 hours.

　　Second, the patient file is more detailed. Individual data footprints are often highly fragmented through data collected from doctoral surgery to specialized medical institutions.One of the core components of GDPR is to ensure that there is more information available about the purpose and location of any data collected.This means that healthcare organizations will record more comprehensively and in more detail.However, according to the GDPR regulations, patients can decide whether their data is retained, which may also be an obstacle to improving diagnosis to some extent.

　　Third, patients are more controlled. Healthcare is one of the most sensitive and intimate areas, but the results of the tests are often widely shared for diagnosis.Patients have little or no knowledge of how to collect this information, who has access to it, and how to store it. GDPR will give patients more opportunities to understand this information and firmly grasp their own data.

　　Four, the data source update. Technologies from social networks are increasingly used to provide healthcare and support to patients.Healthcare professionals often use instant messaging tools such as Whatsapp to send patient data to each other.When this information is transmitted through the network, this may mean that sensitive data is held outside the EU, violating the GDPR regulations.To this end, Hospify, a European mobile communications company, has developed a messaging service similar to Whatsapp, enabling medical teams to securely send patient data via an EU-based network.Hospify encrypts and transmits text messages from the phone to the phone and removes the information from the server within 72 hours, which ensures data updates while greatly reducing security breaches.

　　Fifth, prevention is more powerful.The EU Health and Food Safety Commission held this year in Brussels "Big Data:The Better Healthcare Connected Solutions conference, referring to the European Reference Network (ERNs), which promotes cross-border medical care for low-epidemic diseases such as rare diseases, states that the success of ERNs depends on big data and will generate and disseminate new clinical, genetic, behavioral and environmental data based on disparate health data sets based on different rare diseases.

　　The large amount of data that medical organizations have been collecting for decades has remained unstructured and inaccessible, and GDPR has created tremendous opportunities for the healthcare industry, and structured and integrated data may accelerate new treatments and strengthen preventive measures.Overall, the implementation of GDPR has excited the medical industry, the main reason is that it may help unlock the potential of a large number of databases that have been dormant for decades.