charlesboyer: blog 
charlesboyer's blog
your "private" medical records are up for sale
Published Oct. 20, 2009Views: 225
It not widely known to patients, but an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity.
Original article via wired.com
The revelation comes in a recent New York Times article about how so-called “scrubbed” patient data isn’t as anonymous as people think. The piece focuses primarily on how anonymized data can be cross-bred with other publicly available databases, such as voting records, which subverts the anonymity. Buried near the end of the article is the news that medical data is collected, anonymized and sold, not by insurance agencies and health care providers, but by third-party vendors who provide medical-record storage in the cloud.
George Hill, an analyst at Leerink Swann, a health care investment bank, told the Times that the market for health record systems is $8 billion to $10 billion annually. About 5 percent of this income comes not from the sale of information systems but from the sale of data and analysis. As more physicians and hospitals — spurred by federal incentives — switch to electronic recordkeeping, revenue from the sale of health data could grow to $5 billion, Hill said.
In some case, the vendor contract specifies that the vendor has exclusive access to the health records in its database, according to Dr. Paul Tang, vice president and chief medical information officer of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and member of a federal privacy advisory panel.
Tang told ModernHealthCare in 2007 that he’d seen such contracts from large and small vendors. “Some [vendors] say they have ownership to data. There are contracts that say they will have real-time access to the database, that they will have exclusive access to the data, that they can resell the data. I think it would be unlawful that covered entities abide by that.”
Filed under: Business & Technology
close![[no avatar]](http://wwwcache.wral.com/presentation/v1/images/golo/noavatar.gif){kind=avatar}
Welcome to GOLO, where WRAL.com visitors can comment on stories and create profile pages, blogs and photo galleries.
You must be a registered WRAL.com user to use these tools. Click here to register or log in.
GOLO member since July 26, 2007
October 20, 2009 1:58 p.m.
GOLO member since October 18, 2007
October 20, 2009 2:01 p.m.
I also found it interesting that legislators were putting exemptions into the Healthcare legislation that would allow people to opt out from having information like abortions and sexually transmitted diseases being included on their medical records because of privacy concerns...while at the same time, insisting that there would be no privacy threat...
GOLO member since August 22, 2007
October 20, 2009 2:19 p.m.
GOLO member since July 7, 2007
October 20, 2009 2:35 p.m.
They make appliances too. I bet they spy on you in your house!
GOLO member since May 8, 2008
October 20, 2009 2:47 p.m.
October 20, 2009 3:59 p.m.
GOLO member since January 2, 2008
October 20, 2009 4:50 p.m.
I don't think these people can legally do what this blog is talking about. Just because they have access to data doesn't give them the right to do anything they want with it.
GOLO member since January 2, 2008
October 20, 2009 4:53 p.m.
Hospitals release forms USUALLY are only valid for 12 months if you read the fine print. They need you to sign a new release every year.
October 20, 2009 5:06 p.m.
Please log in to add comment.