Medical, financial and contract documents are hard to keep track of, keep updated and share easily with trusted professionals like new doctors but a new startup called OwnYourInfo launched today that provides a unified dashboard with alerts, permissions and a mobile interface for managing all those assets for just $5 per month.
The service also creates reports dynamically that illustrate the changes to categories like cash flow, medical history and permutations between different categories. It’s a handy little system that could point toward the future of user-centric ownership over the giant cloud of data created by living in the modern world.
Health, insurance, auto, property, career and other categories of personal records are easy to store in OwnYourInfo, and easy to share permanently or temporarily when you need to. The company says, for example, that doctors regularly make medical decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate self-reported medical histories because patients simply don’t remember them well enough. OwnYourInfo tracks that and other types of personal history and lets you share some or all of it with whoever you like.
Below: A dashboard on the web app, click for full size.
When Google Health was shut down this Summer, many people were very surprised that the company would leave a sector still so young and with so much potential. Any number of other companies are likely to emerge to compete to best serve consumers’ need for management and access control over an increasingly common and valuable asset: their personal data.
Earlier this year we wrote about The Locker Project, another startup that aimed to specialize in online storage of personal data and making it programmatically available as an app platform.
All kinds of companies are likely to offer services at different points in the personal data value chain. OwnYourInfo has done a good job of building an interface that helps make the abstract concepts involved with personal data easy to understand and manage.
If there’s a downside to the startup at launch, it’s that OwnYourInfo is an unknown quantity. The company says it has invested a lot of time and energy into data security, but it will no doubt need to win the trust of both users who store data in the system and parties that see data shared with them through it. Personal finance startup Mint (now owned by Intuit) had to struggle with the same issue though, and that worked out fine. OwnYourInfo now says it aims to be “the Mint of personal documents.”
