The Clinical Promise and Ethical Pitfalls of Electronic Phenotyping
Health IT Analytics October 19, 2023
Healthcare big data mining can provide valuable insights into a patient’s health but may reveal non-disclosed information, raising concerns about patient privacy.
As information technology (IT) methods for disease surveillance, predictive analytics, and clinical decision support become more advanced, big data mining will be crucial to ensure tools use large, high-quality datasets.
Data mining can enable electronic phenotyping— a process to query electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical information systems to extract patient characteristics or conditions for research purposes.
While electronic phenotyping can be useful for use cases such as identifying patients with a particular disease for recruitment in a clinical trial, it can also reveal sensitive patient characteristics not disclosed to a clinician, such as transgender identity.
The revelation...