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Healthcare Industry and Data Access
Access to data is a very sensitive issue in the healthcare industry, and privacy is extremely important.
However, access to larger datasets - symptoms, dates, treatments, followups - has the potential to improve outcomes for patients by a vast amount.
What steps do we need to take to go about making policy changes that will standardise, anonymize and make available patient data across hospitals and healthcare systems, so that data scientists can begin linking symptoms to diseases, and treatments to outcomes, and provide primary caregivers with this valuable information?
80 months ago
1 answer
Healthcare data is indeed very sensitive and private. The concern is that the plans that provide for benefits have a duty to protect the confidential elements in the data. As claims payment is a healthcare function, this is appropriate. The use of data to identify opportunities in in healthcare improvement is pointed only to the health plan.
Second, the ownership of the data relates to the plan in part, but the primary approving base for use of data with identifiable personal health information (PHI) outside the plan must be the members choice and decision; unless blinded and without identifiable elements that could lead back to the member.
No plan desires to approach the sensitive area of outsourcing data mining due to legal consequences. The plans find no value for this effort only legal risk; thus, it is not done unless it is approved by the policy from CMS. Tom
79 months ago
