Data generated by your body is routinely captured and sold by healthcare companies. Shouldn't you benefit from it, too ?
Getting access to your medical information is supposed to be good for you, and good for the country. It's supposed to help you take charge of your health, and save the beleaguered US healthcare system loads of money. Getting your medical record can reveal life-changing information: Symptoms you should be watching, drugs you shouldn't take, even diagnoses you didn't know you had. So the federal government has poured billions into making it easier for people to access their medical information.
In reality your medical information is anything but free. If you would take on the challenge of claiming your data from those who hold it hostage, you must prepare for the journey. You may be forced to scale massive bureaucracies, combat insane copyright laws, sneak into secret data stashes, hack into medical devices — or perhaps even locate a working fax machine.
Scientists mine this "data exhaust" for previously undetected patterns in health and illness. Pharmaceutical companies analyze prescription data to figure out how to sell more drugs to both doctors and patients. Data analytics companies purchase millions of electronic health records, lab test results, and insurance claims reports, slicing it and dicing it to expose patterns that weren't visible before. These data-mining startups, a fast-growing sector of the digital health industry, brought in more than $400 million in venture capital last year. They sell custom reports to all manner of buyers: employers trying to predict how much they'll spend on healthcare, companies selling products and services to hospitals, and hospitals looking for ways to charge more for their services.
All of these people can get their hands on your data and make money off it. But for you — the wellspring of all this value — it is not so easy, even though it can be far more precious to you.
https://backchannel.com/our-medical-data-must-become-free-f6d533db6bed
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:20PM
Do we smell free healthcare somewhere here? Same as free email?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by archfeld on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:30PM
I am a Kaiser Permanente patient. I can see 10 years worth of my records online with a few keystrokes, and get my entire medical history in print for a few bucks. I am sure it's more difficult if you have switched coverages or had many DR's in the past.
As for free health care, smelling or otherwise, it wouldn't really be free you'd just be trading valuable information for an equally valuable resource. Seems like a win-win situation, unless you are the companies getting it for nothing currently.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:50PM
Kaiser is an HMO. Try taking that data outside the HMO.
It isn't just getting your hands on it, it is getting it in a format that parseable by the people you take it to. Paper being the most extreme example. It is a notorious problem that every electronic health records implementation is incompatible with all the others. There is no standard interchange format, it is all ad hoc at best which means much of the time data gets dropped, or even worse, gets parsed incorrectly so the end result is just flat out wrong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Francis on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:51PM
I used to be with Group Health that was recently acquired by Kaiser and same thing there. A few things like X-Rays require some work to obtain, but that's mostly because they aren't stored in the same place that the text documents are. They're still available for those that want.
The main reason why these records can be hard to get is that many providers have been using paper records rather than electronic ones. Electronic records can be quickly collected and provided whenever you want, but paper copies require a lot more effort.
But, it's been legally required for them to provide the records on request for quite some time now, the procedures just vary from insurer to insurer and from doctor to doctor in terms of how you go about getting them.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday February 13 2016, @10:23PM
legally required
Agreed, the whole article seems out of touch with current reality...
There are lots of regional doctor clinics in my area (large-ish multi-location organizations). The one was using had a disclaimer that I can get all my records on DVD, including text in PDFs, any xRay images, ultrasound movies, lab test results, angiogram images, prescription history, etc. The cost was nominal, like 10 bucks to produce, and you can read it like any data DVD, with common tools. It also had dispensing records from the pharmacies I got my prescriptions filled at.
I moved from one such clinic organization to another, and the one I was moving out of gave me two disks, one for the new clinic, which they said was in an industry-standard-transfer format, and one for me. This cost me nothing, oddly enough, because they were referring me to the new place. Maybe my insurance got billed for that, I don't know.
I perused the disk, lots and lots of time stamped PDFs with one page of records followed by 5 to 20 pages of explanation boiler-plate.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 13 2016, @08:04PM
Kaiser is doing the right thing for you, but so many of the providers are attempting to lock-in and monetize at every opportunity. We've passed a sort of "stage 1" where at least most records are stored electronically, but are still far from "stage 2" where those records are readily accessible/interchangeable between systems, while also being protected against exploitation.
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