"Thomas M. Swiss" writes:
A (possibly stupid) thought: could commercial key escrow help here?
I very much want hospitals to have fast access to my medical data if my broken and bleeding body should come through their door, even if I am unconscious and my personal physician cannot be reached. On the other hand, I don't want anyone to be snooping through them right now.
Actually, Bell Labs outlines a system which can preserve anonymity under these circumstances in "The Use of Communications Networks to Increase Personal Privacy In a Health Insurance Architecture" at <URL:ftp://ftp.research.att.com/dist/anoncc/privacy.health.ps.Z>. It's based on their anonymous credit card protocol, which is really a sort of identity escrow service managed by a remailer. You might find it interesting.