Medical Economics October 3, 2020
Medical records, which most patients think are private and protected, are in reality lucrative commodities in a multibillion-dollar industry.
Medical records, which most patients think are private and protected, are in reality lucrative commodities in a multibillion-dollar industry. As hospitals and health networks assemble these records, they routinely strip away names and other identifiers and sell millions of HIPAA-compliant files to massive aggregator corporations. Aggregators in turn profit from integrating, analyzing and selling access to data on a massive scale. For example, Truven Health Analytics, part of IBM Watson Health, brought 215 million patient records to IBM when it was purchased in 2016, raising IBM’s total to about 300 million records. Access to these records is sold to pharmaceutical companies,...
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