Pictures and photo as paradigm for medical data

There has been significant discussion on who owns medical data. The hospital or service that collects the data or the patients themselves? Then there are questions about how do we manage the data – who manages the data? Security issues? Exchange and storage? And more importantly business issues on who commercializes the data – who pays for it and who benefits from the data.
One area that has been discussed often in the context of these questions is how you track the data. The data could be a “Doctor’s report” which could be a single page comment or it could be massive health report that includes fitness tracking devices.
A paradigm for managing healthcare data is management of picture data.
Pictures are distributed throughout the internet and there have been many mechanisms proposed to guard the rights of the photographers who sell the pictures vs users who would like to cut-and-paste the pictures into their private and commercial domains. A very similar mechanism has been the addition of watermark to the image. Some of it is secret but quite often is simple signature that is applied to one corner of the image that claims ownership. Then there are data signatures that are applied to the image that subtly change the image without affecting the data.
One simple method that has been used to attach metadata to the image file that can be read by many computer programs and that tells you more about the source of the data and also provides copyright and ownership information.
Metadata is simply been called as “data about data” and is defined as any data that is not visible to the user looking at the picture but can be read by the computer.
There are two types of metadata that are attached to any picture. EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) and IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council)
EXIF metadata: This is metadata that represents capture parameters such as the camera used to take the photo, resolution of the picture, date and time of capture, GPS information and also other information such as unique file names or other information relevant to the logistics of image capture
IPTC metadata:  The IPTC data is usually user added data. This includes all the information that could be about the subject, photographer and copyright. This is where any additional information can be stored.
This model of data can be used for storage of any additional information that would be important for an health record. This metadata concept would be the one that could also store information about where the health data was collected and any other additional information. The metadata can also be secured such that any change to the metadata will also be recorded or any change will make the data invalid.
Having such an information source linked to the data may make the data transportable and assure a basic security though much more rigor on the data encryption methods will need to be used.