Defanging HIPAA: How Your De-identified Data Was Re-identified For Profit.

BY MIKE MAGEE, M.D. Arthur Sackler continues to demonstrate just how wealthy one can become by advantaging patients and their diseases. He’s been dead since 1987, but his ghost continues to access your personal health data, pushes medical consumption and over-utilization, and expands profits exponentially for data abusers well beyond his wildest dreams. Back in 1954, he and his friend and secret business partner, Bill Frohlich, were the first to realize that individual health data could be a goldmine. That relationship would still be a secret had it not been exposed in a messy family inheritance feud unleashed by his third wife after Sackler’s death. That company, IMS Health, was taken public and listed on the NYSE on April 4, 2014, transferring $1.3 billion in stock. I’ll come back to that in a moment. But in the early years, the pair realized that the data they were collecting would multiply in value if it could be correlated with a second data set. That dataset was the AMA’s Physician Masterfile which tracked the identity and location of all physicians in America from the time they entered medical school.  Those doctors were largely unaware that they had been assigned an identifier number early in their career, or that they were being tracked, or that the AMA was profiting from the sales of their information. With this additional information, IMS information products helped inform companies’ commercialization plans, their pharmaceutical m...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Sharing? Privacy? Both? Uncategorized Arthur Sackler Congress HIPPA IMS Health Medical-Industrial Complex Mike Magee MQIC Source Type: blogs