HEALTH+: Empowering Individuals via Unifying Health Data

Managing personal health data is a challenge in today's fragmented and institution-centric healthcare ecosystem. Individuals often lack meaningful control over their medical records, which are scattered across incompatible systems and formats. This vision paper presents Health ⁺, a user-centric, multimodal health data management system that empowers individuals (including those with limited technical expertise) to upload, query, and share their data across modalities (e.g., text, images, reports). Rather than aiming for institutional overhaul, Health ⁺ emphasizes individual agency by providing intuitive interfaces and intelligent recommendations for accessing and sharing data. At the system level, it tackles the complexity of storing, integrating, and securing heterogeneous health records, ensuring both efficiency and privacy. By unifying multimodal data and prioritizing patients, Health ⁺ enables a more connected, interpretable, and user-controlled health information ecosystem.