I'm failing to see the point of this. You pick a "pod provider" and then they host your data for you, right? And that provider is just backing it on some cloud host. why would I do this
Even if you continue to host your data on Dropbox or Google Drive, you have total control over the underlying data--you can audit, modify, or delete it at any time.
From the application side, it also means you no longer have to deal with persistent state, which means you can ship applications with no backend. That's an order of magnitude easier to develop and maintain.
The downsides are real though: the user experience is often jankier, and the lack of a central database makes it really hard to do anything social/realtime. I'm rooting for Solid but am not yet convinced they'll make it.
with a system like this, you can tap into a sign in station and give them access.
Doctors can also send you any documents they generate and it gets stored in your POD.
The trade off - clerk doesn't have to spend less than a minute looking up and giving me a time for my next appointment and I have to setup yet another id & password to use their crappy appointment/medical forms app in a cloud somewhere.