[Update] May 21, 2018 – Terms were reached and agreement executed that completes the 3.6.2018 announcement.
Today CLOUD – Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data – announced its intentions to acquire the software assets of Thrive Technologies. CLOUD’s open-source vision for creating a new paradigm for privacy, security, identity and data on the Internet was born of its founder, Gary Thompson, late wife’s 11 year on-and-off battle with breast cancer. He saw firsthand the challenges with our paper-based approach to digital solutions. Thrive shares this open-source vision with its “Mint-like” tools to provide access to health information. “CLOUD re-imagines health information as decentralized, self-validating, and patient controlled. It addresses many of the most challenging aspects of healthcare record management, including security, interoperability, and permission-based sharing,” said Ron Green, founder and CEO of Thrive Technologies.
Like HTML, CLOUD’s CTML – context markup language – something its founder first spoke of at TEDxAustin in his talk, “Reweaving the Fabric of the Internet to Transform Humanity” is meant to rethink the sharing of information at a systemic level. Gary Thompson, founder and CEO of CLOUD, Inc. put it this way, “privacy, security, identity, and data liquidity are not four separate problems but axes of the same core problem.” Many of the recent announcements of new standards and new approaches, even from the largest technology providers in the world, are shackled by an Internet that looks more like an electronic courier service for documents than the brave new digital realm that it is. CLOUD represents a paradigm shift, not just a technology one.
CLOUD’s proposed Digital Weavers™ are to CTML what browsers like Chrome, Safari, and FireFox are to HTML. As CLOUD continues to develop the underlying open source foundation for this new vision that goes beyond tangles and chains, Thrive represents a suite of tools that could be woven together by health-oriented Digital Weavers. “We keep talking about providing access to patient data, but really what we are doing is providing a login and passcode to records,” said Thompson. “we have to go beyond buttons that simply let us create another digital copy of a health record. We must be able to contextually weave together relevant data from across silos to unlock the potential of information from patients to healthcare professionals to researchers looking for cures for things like cancer..”
CLOUD will provide updates later this year when it is ready to move Thrive’s software tools out into the open source community. CLOUD will also be sharing announcements of groundbreaking prototypes and pilots in the cancer space. “I made a promise to my wife, Maureen, on 10.21.2014, the day she passed,” said Thompson at Susan G. Komen’s 2017 Big Data 4 Breast Cancer event. “CLOUD is how I keep that promise to her and millions of others fighting cancer.” [Gary’s address at the Komen event here.]
About CLOUD, Inc.
CLOUD is the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. CLOUD a non-profit technology standard consortia [considering both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) status for both our philanthropic work and our future open-source standards]. The Internet recently celebrated its 40th anniversary; HTML has only occupied a little over 15 years of that history. In those 15 years, HTML has moved the Internet away from its roots and made the experience more about web pages than people. CLOUD believes this must change, and that individuals must be put back at the center of the Internet, rather than the many silos that separate us.
About Thrive Technologies
Thrive builds beautiful, easy to use, web and mobile applications that let people access and manage their entire health history.
– Biometric tracking (blood pressure, cholesterol, heart rate, weight, height, etc)
– Document management (PDFs, images, zip files, etc)
– Medical image support (X-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, and MRIs)
– Medications, conditions, procedures, immunizations, allergies, appointments
– Dependent profiles so parents can manage their children’s history