A universal, national program supported by taxpayer money might make more sense. All that information could be placed on a chip card to carry in a wallet, which could be scanned by each new provider. Or, as Jim McGroddy, a former IBM executive who has served on many healthcare boards, suggests, it could be stored in a national data collection system akin to a credit agency like Equifax. If a public agency kept records of all your medical encounters in a secure and searchable form, they could be made available to providers of your choosing.
