I stumbled upon this paper and my first reaction was to make fun of it on hacker news for being yet another stupid NFT claim.

But, if you look at the authors, they seem to be smart people. They come from places like Baylor College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School or Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law. If you read their paper (sorry I did not find a version without paywall and the version I read is linked to my employer) they make some valid claims how a blockchain or NFT-like system could alter health information systems in a good way. Reading the full paper is not necessary for my point of the discussion. I argue and would like to discuss it here, that we increasingly see that buzzwords are used to hide well understood problems.

The authors know that giving data access to the right people and keeping the wrong people from accessing it, is hard. Additionally they know, that giving patients control on who has access to their data is even harder. Getting patient data out of proprietary systems and enable true interoperable data exchange in the medical domain is super hard. Yet, still they claim that NFT-like systems could fix all these problems. So they fall for the trap that the problems were "hidden" by yet another buzzword. A smart contract will allow us to regulate who has access, the blockchain will offer transparency and control, storing the data in distributed system will increase availability. These problems are still hard problems, some might even argue that solving them in the "blockchain" way might even be harder than solving them with "conventional" technology.

Am I to pessimistic or is this trend something you think about, too?