No Country Gives People Full Control of Their Health Records; New 198-Country Health Record Rights Index Finds

SuperTruth's open index maps health-record rights worldwide, gives AI assistants cited answers and introduces practical tools to help people act on what they find

Dustin Raney, Chief Strategy Officer of SuperTruth to present findings from the Health Record Rights Index at World Summit AI in Amsterdam on Thursday, October 8

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- In none of 198 countries and territories do people hold the keys to their own health record alone, according to the new Health Record Rights Index from SuperTruth, a company that checks how far health data can be trusted before AI acts on it. Doctors, hospitals and insurers control the record in 81 countries and territories, governments control it in 66, and people share control with the health system in the remaining 51.

Health records are moving between providers, apps and AI systems faster than patients can see, correct or control them. The index lets people check their rights, challenge mistakes and ask who can access their data, while giving reporters, researchers and developers open evidence to expose gaps and build solutions.

The open index scores every country from 0 to 100 on a central question: Can a person see, control and share their own health record? It measures eight areas, including access to the full record, control over who sees it, privacy and security, protection from commercial use, consent for research and rules governing AI in healthcare.

Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary and Sweden lead, scoring between 67 and 71. Allowing for scoring uncertainty, any of the five could rank first. The typical country scores 39, and no country reaches the index's highest band.

"Your health record is about you, but it isn't really yours," said Bobby Hill, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SuperTruth. "That matters even more now that AI is reading those records and acting on them. Before we ask whether an AI system can be trusted, we need to understand the record it is reading, who controls it and whether the evidence behind it stands up."

The United States: rights depend on where you live

The United States scores 48 out of 100, tied for 55th. Americans have a legal right to obtain a copy of their health record, but considerably less control over who sees it or how health information may be used.

The index also maps what each of the 50 states and Washington, D.C. adds to federal law. It finds:

• In 28 states, at least some businesses outside HIPAA must obtain a person's permission before using or sharing health data.
• In 19 states, at least one rule governing AI in healthcare is already in force.
• Among the 47 states fully checked across five central questions, researchers found 39 different combinations of rights. Thirty-six were unique to a single state.

Open to patients, researchers, developers and AI

Every score links to the laws, government pages and other public sources. Each country also receives an evidence grade adapted from SuperTruth's Data Trust Index™. The grade assesses the strength of the cited evidence; it does not alter the country's rights score.

The complete data is available under a Creative Commons license through downloadable CSV and JSON files, a free API and a read-only MCP server. This allows AI assistants to answer questions such as, "What rights do I have to my health record in Texas?" using current, cited information rather than generating an unsupported answer.

The data is also available through Zenodo, Hugging Face and Kaggle. The website includes search, plain-language questions and answers for every country and U.S. state, downloadable charts and more than 460 published examples of real health-record problems, refreshed weekly.

"Healthcare keeps asking how much it can trust AI, when the fundamental questions are what is AI reading and who controls it," said Dustin Raney, Chief Strategy Officer of SuperTruth. "We made every score, source and underlying rule open so patients, researchers, developers and AI assistants can inspect the evidence rather than guess."

Raney will present the findings from the Health Record Rights Index at World Summit AI in Amsterdam on Thursday, October 8.

Turning the findings into action

People worldwide can now use healthrecordrights.com/act to find who to contact about their health record: a national patient portal where one exists, the privacy regulator, a patient rights body, or the health ministry. People in the U.S. can also find a state consumer protection contact and opt-out details for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In all, the site lists more than 360 official contacts, each checked against an official source.

Embeddable score badges for newsrooms and schools, and a free developer starter kit for the open API are live now. A Spanish-language edition is in development.

SuperTruth is now developing an action kit that will help people:

• Request their health record in any country or U.S. state.
• Find out whether and how they can opt out of a state health information exchange.
• Correct an inaccurate record.
• Identify where to complain when their rights are not respected.

A Spanish-language edition, embeddable score badges for newsrooms and schools, and alerts when national or state rules change are also in development. SuperTruth also plans to invite developers to build new public tools using the open Health Record Rights API.

"An index should do more than tell people where they stand," Raney added. "The next step is giving them something practical they can do with that knowledge."

How the index was built

AI research agents built on Anthropic's Claude reviewed laws and official sources in each country's language. A second agent cross-checked each jurisdiction, and the authors resolved every disputed finding. The scoring rules, underlying sources, code, revisions and tests of ranking stability are public.

No independent human re-score has yet been completed. SuperTruth is inviting legal, healthcare and data experts, as well as members of the public, to review the findings and submit corrections. Accepted changes will be documented publicly.

Explore the index, data and press kit at healthrecordrights.com.

About SuperTruth

SuperTruth builds data-trust infrastructure for AI. Its Data Trust Index™ scores the evidence behind data and records, while its broader technology helps organizations trace where information came from, assess the agents using it and preserve an auditable record of the result. SuperTruth began in healthcare, where inaccurate or incomplete data can carry the greatest consequences. By cleaning, structuring, and orchestrating data, SuperTruth empowers organizations to unlock insights that drive better decisions, outcomes, and operational efficiency. Learn more at supertruth.ai

SOURCE SuperTruth