Building a way for people to sell their personal medical data would help researchers create a rich database that helps solve health problems. The big catch is if it’s even possible to build such a system, and who would buy into it.

Data can help researchers and companies get valuable insights when developing therapies for cancer patients, for example. And more people means richer data. One hurdle to creating an exchange system for people to willingly contribute information is how much those individual data are worth and how that value is determined.

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Hank Greely, director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and chairman of the Center for Biomedical Ethics steering committee, has his doubts for good ways to monetize such data while protecting patient privacy.

“My own sort of grumpy conclusion is that there is no way to protect privacy in situations like this. People who want to do it will just have to risk the privacy of their health data,” Greely told Bloomberg Law in a Jan. 27 email.

“As to compensation, figuring out a royalty kind of system seems very hard to me because of the difficulty of assigning cause/contribution to any particular person’s data … and any flat compensation would likely not be very much,” Greely said.