Businessweek: 'Your Medical Records Are for Sale'
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
As hospitals shift to digital medical records, administrators promise patients better care and shorter waits. They often neglect to mention that they share files with state health agencies, which in turn sell the information to private data-mining companies. The records are stripped of names and addresses, and there’s no evidence that data miners are doing the legwork to identify individual patients. Yet the records often contain patients’ ages, Zip Codes, and treatment dates—enough metadata for an inquiring mind to match names to files or for aggressive companies to target ads or hike insurance premiums.
... Exempt from federal health-privacy laws, states have long sold medical data to help finance public health studies. Demand for the information, which is relatively cheap, has shifted from university research programs to commercial data miners, which incorporate it into reports and databases they sell to direct marketers, insurers, and makers of drugs and medical devices. Twelve of the most populous U.S. states generated $1.91 million from 1,698 data sales in 2011, the latest year for which figures are available, public records show.
... The bottom line: Medical data sold cheaply by state health agencies often contain details that can be used to identify patients.
Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-08/your-medical-records-are-for-sale
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