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How Big Data can mend our broken healthcare system: study

What this is talking about is sharing your private health history (your "life certificate") with just about anybody who asks. Even attempts at anonymizing data will fail. When past illnesses, medical procedures, and hospitalizations about a person are made available, it's easy to identify the person and from there learn any other sensitive information made available by the life certificate.

And with data being collected by literally millions of health workers, it's hard to guarantee the consistency and accuracy of it. It could be useless, and yet the conclusions drawn from it would be taken as gospel truth.

I absolutely agree! Many other things about this are scary.

Before retiring I worked in the Health Information Technology field for almost 40 years...the last 7 as a consultant to hospitals all over the USA. While I do not believe in the "big data base in the sky" there has to be a way individuals can keep pertinent information about their health. In my 73 years I have medical information in several hospitals, doctors offices, labs, clinics etc. some of which is important (drug allergies/reactions etc.)to any healthcare provider. I think "Life certificates" (which would be carried by an individual) are a good idea. They would just contain pertinent data (and that would have to be figured out) in order to give life saving information to any health care provider. There are many things I know about my "medical life" but there are other things I have been told that I do not entirely remember and if one is really ill it is a struggle to convey any information.. It is too late for me but for future patients it is a great idea. In the day and age of "flash" drives there should be a way for an individual to keep relevant information and for providers to be able read and assess same.

My sister in-law is a medical professional, researcher and college professor. All of her research articles are based upon data gleaned from shared databases, which consolidate data from all over, since it must be provided to the Federal government, who untimately funds medical R&D as well as care. " Circumvent the health care system, which is not designed for the collection of data, and legal privacy concerns by collecting health data outside the medical system". 1. This would be illegal. 2. The health care system is most certainly designed for data collection, since providers can't get paid by the government and/or private insurers without highly detailed data about patient diagnosis and treatment. 3. A patient can give their consent for their medical data to be shared between insurers and providers, but there is no way they can compel any particular research program to share data aquired by them with other databases, since they would be breaking various federal laws. There are other data collection sources, which collect and disseminate information about your health care for a price. Everytime you get a prescription filled at most pharmacies, that data is sold to a data wharehouse company in D.C. which ultimately sells it to drug companies who use it to determine what drugs (theirs or competitors) are being prescribed by which doctors everywhere. If a competitor's drugs are being prescribed by a particular doctor, they make a point to ship samples and marketing materials to the doctor to try to influence him/her to prescribe their product instead. At one point, they hoped to sell directly to patients based upon this data, but congress put the kabal on that idea. So you see, the most important details about your health care are already up for grabs for anybody with the $$$ and a reason to know.

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