Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick

[eridani]

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-03/hospitals-are-mining-patients-credit-card-data-to-predict-who-will-get-sick

Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you let your gym membership lapse, make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter, or begin shopping at plus-size clothing stores. For patients of Carolinas HealthCare System, which operates the largest group of medical centers in North and SouthCarolina, such a day could be sooner than they think. Carolinas HealthCare, which runs more than 900 care centers, including hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, and surgical centers, has begun plugging consumer data on 2 million people into algorithms designed to identify high-risk patients so that doctors can intervene before they get sick. The company purchases the data from brokers who cull public records, store loyalty program transactions, and credit card purchases.

Information on consumer spending can provide a more complete picture than the glimpse doctors get during an office visit or through lab results, says Michael Dulin, chief clinical officer for analytics and outcomes research at Carolinas HealthCare. The Charlotte-based hospital chain is placing its data into predictive models that give risk scores to patients. Within two years, Dulin plans to regularly distribute those scores to doctors and nurses who can then reach out to high-risk patients and suggest changes before they fall ill. “What we are looking to find are people before they end up in trouble,” says Dulin, who is a practicing physician.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. A similar article was posted recently, and I think one thing to note in particular

is in the line:

The company purchases the data from brokers who cull public records, store loyalty program transactions, and credit card purchases.

Ie, that they're not collecting any data on you that isn't already out there and available to anyone with the money to buy it.

This is actually in line with the '2020 Healthy People Initiative' or whatever they're calling it, which includes a nationwide push to move healthcare from 'tertiary' treatments (ie, waiting until people have made themselves sick and then trying to 'fix it') to primary (preventative) care. (ie, trying to reach people before they make themselves sick, and head off chronic issues like obesity, COPD, and the like before they get started.) One reason our healthcare system is far more costly than it should be is that we spend almost nothing on preventing chronic diseases, but instead wait until we then have to continue to treat them with visit after visit to the hospital.

Not only should proper preventative care reduce the cost of healthcare by large amounts, but it also means that the years people live will be far healthier and happier than if they must endure one or more chronic conditions for the rest of their lives.

[eridani]

2. Not so. Prevention costs money; it doesn't save money. It saves lives, and that COSTS money.

That is to say with respect to lifetime health care costs, not just individual diseases in isolation. The people with the lowest lifetime health care costs are fat smokers, because dead people don't need health care.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. You don't die immediately from chronic diseases.

You suck up vast amounts of care along the way. People often survive multiple heart attacks related to obesity, with each hospital trip costing upwards of a hundred grand. Heck, even chest pains that are checked out as possible heart attacks run tens of thousands. The bill for my visit to the hospital to be checked out for a possible heart attack ran 30k+.

And COPD patients tend to make an awful lot of trips back too.

So yeah, prevention is far less costly than treating chronic conditions.

[eridani]

4. No it isnt.

My grandmother died at age 53. My father died at age 59. Here I am at age 67, not even needing insulin yet. Which of us will have the highest lifetime health care costs? That would obviously be me. Every extra day you live is a lottery ticket for being creamed by a drunk driver, and many other mishaps.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

6. You are seriously going to argue from anecdote?

That's great for you. And for every 'you' out there, there are hundreds of far younger people already on insulin thanks to our obesity epidemic.

[eridani]

9. It's been confirmed by research

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html?_r=1

Smokers and the obese cheaper to care for, study shows

LONDON — Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it does not save money, according to a new report.

It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.

"It was a small surprise," said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, who led the study. "But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more."

In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.

[Brigid]

5. Be that as it may . . .

This is still too Big Brother-ish for my taste. It creeps me out. I am a privacy bug, what can I say.

[Scuba]

8. Hear hear.

[kelliekat44]

7. But we only care about NSA and what they mine. nt

[xfundy]

10. Believe it or not, I predicted this

years ago when grocery stores stopped having sales without their loyalty cards. OK, I was a little off-- I figured insurance companies would get ahold of the data first.

[Oilwellian]

11. I did not use my real name and address for my loyalty cards

and I pay by check. It's nobody's business what I buy at the grocery store. Fuck these fascists.