Your Medical Records Are for Sale

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 add...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bloomberg businessweek (Online) 2013-08, p.41
Main Author: Robertson, Jordan
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Data mining
Electronic health records
Hospitals
Patient satisfaction
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0007-7135
2162-657X