Well, apparently Joe Biden is going to jump-start our Apollo Program equivalent for cancer research.
But as I know from my work on electronic medical records 2005-2007, most medical software is a godawful clusterfoo if you so much as scratch the gilding on the GUI with your fingernail. So if you have a bit of runway in front of you, there's a lot of money to be made in medical software that even does as little as keeping a unique, secure identity record for 300 million patients.
If anyone does do this, please don't enforce uniqueness. My dad is a doctor and he complains about medical software that assumes previously input data is correct and does things like preventing inputting a new patient just because their ss id is supposedly already registered to someone else. Then there are the classic data validation mistakes like assuming everyone has a first name and last name (some foreign nationals don't), assuming everyone has a birth date (some people don't know this), assuming addresses have streets, etc... Doctors see patients from all over the world, and the world is a pretty diverse place.
If anyone links the social security number to this, I will kill them myself, not only with just my bare hands and ten gallons of boiling rage, but using only the ring fingers. Ever try doing something with just your ring fingers? It's gonna be slow and clumsy.
I was thinking more along the lines of just keeping a list of hundreds of millions of unique integers, and linking as many identifiers to them as are necessary. If you have a keyed database, it is essential to have unique keys for indexing.
Identity records all over have all kinds of problems, mostly due to stupid assumptions--like assuming that a SSN always uniquely identifies one individual.
