A different version of this article appeared here in the Library of Law and Liberty.

The U.S. healthcare industry is notoriously inefficient and troublesomely massive. It’s also wealthy and getting wealthier and more powerful as medical costs have exceeded, by some estimates, $10,000 per person.

What’s to be done?

Back in 2005, a group of healthcare experts asked, in a RAND Corporation study, whether electronic medical-record systems could transform healthcare by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The answer, in short, was: it depends.

Although systematizing electronic medical records could save over $81 billion per year, these potential savings would be realized, the study concluded, only if healthcare in the United States integrated new technologies to allow for the flow of medical data between the patient and relevant parties such as doctors, hospitals, or insurers. Non-standardized record systems would result, by contrast, in inconsistent, inefficient, and incomplete data exchanges that could increase rather than decrease costs.

RAND Corporation revisited the issue in 2013, finding that healthcare expenditures had grown by $800 million since 2005 in part because systems of electronic medical records remained non-standardized. “We believe that the original promise of health IT can be met,” wrote Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones, the authors of the study, “if the systems are redesigned to address these flaws by creating more-standardized systems that are easier to use, are truly interoperable, and afford patients more access to and control over their health data.”

Healthcare in the United States is constitutionally fragmented: Not only does the industry consist of various entities, from doctors and hospitals and insurance providers to commercial suppliers of devices, goods, and services, but also the pricing of medical services is unreliable and unpredictable in part because the country is so large and the industry subject to different regulations from state to state.

Information integration could go a long way towards cutting medical costs and increasing medical savings. For example, it could reduce waste resulting from misdiagnoses, repetitive procedures, erroneous prescriptions, and duplicate testing and imaging.

What if there were a simple solution for this waste?

One entrepreneur believes he’s found the technology to revolutionize the way healthcare records are shared and maintained through Health Information Exchange (HIE).

Robert E. Higgs is the founder of ICUcare, a company that aims to improve technologies in the fields of telemedicine and electronic health records. He has invented a “smart” health card that can contain a patient’s complete medical history, which is stored in a cloud. His vision is that patients own their personalized smart cards, which they can voluntarily submit to healthcare providers and institutions for cheaper and more efficient services. Data on the card are easily stored and updated and exchanged only with the patient’s consent; thus, in the case of emergency, the patient’s medical records can be readily accessed and quickly reviewed.

There remains, sadly, a felt need to transition the healthcare industry from paper to electronic records. The smart card meets this need, but it does much more. It tracks your billing history, reconciles erroneous payment information, protects against fraud and identity-theft, and serves as a conveniently portable device.

One would expect such a card to have been in circulation by now, given the extensive government investment in HIEs. President George W. Bush, for example, issued an executive order in 2004 to create the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) designed to advance technology and innovation pertaining to the exchange of healthcare information. This office created eHealth Exchange, a coalition of states, federal agencies, hospitals, medical groups, pharmacies, and other such entities that’s now run by the Sequoia Project.

But the federal government and the public-private partnerships it has fostered have been unable to produce a smart card that matches Higgs’s in capability and functionality. And even if they had, government retention of sensitive medical data would, among other things, raise privacy concerns that voluntary private transactions and coordination would alleviate.

Moreover, the many spinoff organizations emanating from the ONC and DHS have only crowded the field with swollen, inefficient government and quasi-government structures and programs. Rather than helping the situation, these putative “solutions” have slowed down innovators like Higgs, forcing them to deal with politicians and bureaucrats rather than patients and hospitals.

Having heard about Higgs’s curious smart card through a friend, I decided to reach out to him to find out more. I asked him, first, about privacy implications, namely whether the smart card could increase incidents of non-consensual data transfers and disclosures.

The smart card, he said, “never sends data to the care provider—it brings the care provider to the data.” He explained that data on the smart card are encrypted using the same standards as those used by the Department of Defense for common-access cards.

“We used Advanced Encryption Standard 265, or AES-256,” he said, “the highest standardized encryption specification that’s used worldwide by entities as diverse as corporations and the U.S. government. The key size of 256 bits means that the key, which turns encrypted data into unencrypted data, is a string of 256 ones or zeros.”

I admitted that I didn’t fully understand.

“Put it this way,” he said. “The research I’ve read indicates that each character has two possibilities—one or zero—for which there are 2,256 possible combinations. If 50% of the possibilities must be exhausted to determine the correct key, then you need to guess 2,255 of them [to hack the encryption].”

Pressed about how long it would take to test all possible keys to break the encryption, Higgs, parroting a claim I’ve heard used to describe bitcoin, said, “The universe itself has existed for 14 billion years. It would take something like 1.5770813e18 longer than our universe’s full age to exhaust just half of the key-space of our encryption.”

An attempt to verify Higgs’s figures turned up a plethora of studies and blog posts about encryption and decryption, bitcoin, hacking, and computer engineering (the calculation appearing on many blogs and tech sites is ~6.7e40, which equals 235,385,265,247,008,100, which is multiplied by 6.7 to yield the 1.5770813e18 number that Higgs supplied).

These calculations can be confusing, but the point Higgs wanted to drive home is that the smart card reverses the current power imbalance: today corporations and governments store medical records that patients often can’t access or don’t know about; the smart card, however, empowers patients to store their own records that they may voluntarily release to corporations and governments. The smart card, in other words, returns agency to the consumer whose data is at stake.

It would also, Higgs alleges, reduce rates of healthcare fraud. According to estimates by the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, the United States loses tens of billions of dollars every year due to healthcare fraud. Canada, Germany, and France have each instituted some form of a smart card to successfully cut back on fraud.

A company called Cerner has just landed a deal with the Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA) to implement an electronic health records system. The move away from the VA’s Vista system to Cerner’s electronic system suggests that at least some government officials are aware of the need to adopt interoperable and integrated measures of retaining and sharing medical records. The VA will implement the same electronic health record system used by the DOD.

So far as I can tell, however, Cerner has not created a smart card like Higgs’s. I reached out to Adam Lee, a senior communications partner at Cerner, to ask about smart cards and Cerner’s hopes and plans with the VA. Lee referred me to this press release about Cerner’s work with the VA but did not discuss smart cards.

Talking to Higgs is like talking to a computer: more engineer than salesman, he’s strikingly intelligent but has difficulty getting through to politicians. He’s monotone and meticulous, frank and unexcitable. He’s fast with facts and figures and savvy with technology, but the average politician wants to know primarily whether the smart card appeals to constituents and only secondarily whether it’s operable and efficient.

Higgs grew emotional during our phone call, however, as he told me the story of his wife, who underwent a routine procedure that went wrong. He claimed that, during this standard operation, errors were made that could have been avoided had her doctors possessed his wife’s proper medical records. She’s been subjected to numerous tests throughout her illness, he said, only to have them redone when visiting a new facility or specialist because of an inability to simply retrieve her medical history. She remains in bad shape, living at home with hired assistance.

This unfortunate situation has motivated Higgs to seek answers to save others from similar mistakes in similar circumstances.

If Higgs’s smart card is so great, you might ask, why hasn’t it been adopted? Why haven’t I heard of it? Why doesn’t it circulate widely? Why aren’t hospitals jumping at the opportunity to use it?

The answer, according to Higgs, is simple: the healthcare industry doesn’t want you to know about his smart card because it doesn’t want to reduce costs. It’s full of people getting rich off inefficiency and artificially high prices. Lobbyists for the healthcare industry have taken advantage of the fear and apathy of politicians to ensure that technological progress is delayed or stymied.

Thus, Higgs describes his job in terms of David versus Goliath.

There are numerous ideas about how to trim healthcare spending; Higgs’s smart card is not the exclusive remedy or sole fix. But it’s an encouraging development. Healthcare spending makes up about 17.8% of the nation’s economy, according to an actuary report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And it shows no signs of decreasing. This trend is unsustainable; something must be done—and undone.

We could use more men like Higgs and less government to push us in the right direction before it’s too late.