Our bodies, our data : how companies make billions selling our medical records
Record details
- ISBN: 9780807033340
- ISBN: 0807033340
- ISBN: 9780807059029
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Physical Description:
print
218 pages ; 24 cm - Publisher: Boston : Beacon Press, [2017]
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-205) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | What the pharmacy knows -- Data bonanza for pharmacies and middlemen -- The covert alliance -- Patient power -- The dossier on your doctor -- Supreme Court battle -- Studying patients over time -- Fighting for patients -- How safe is "anonymized"? -- Korean War over patient data -- The patient's data tower of babel -- 21st century advances -- Intimate, anonymized, and for sale -- At the bottom of Niagara. |
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- Baker & Taylor
Explains how patient medical data is at risk from identity thieves and hackers, despite the fact that comprehensive electronic files continue to be elusive, and details the best way for big data to advance medicine and improve lives. - Random House, Inc.
How the hidden trade in our sensitive medical information became a multibillion-dollar business, but has done little to improve our health-care outcomes
Hidden to consumers, patient medical data has become a multibillion-dollar worldwide trade industry between our health-care providers, drug companies, and a complex web of middlemen. This great medical-data bazaar sells copies of the prescription you recently filled, your hospital records, insurance claims, blood-test results, and more, stripped of your name but possibly with identifiers such as year of birth, gender, and doctor. As computing grows ever more sophisticated, patient dossiers become increasingly vulnerable to reidentification and the possibility of being targeted by identity thieves or hackers.
Paradoxically, comprehensive electronic files for patient treatmentâthe reason medical data exists in the first placeâremain an elusive goal. Even today, patients or their doctors rarely have easy access to comprehensive records that could improve care. In the evolution of medical data, the instinct for profit has outstripped patient needs. This book tells the human, behind-the-scenes story of how such a system evolved internationally.
It begins with New York advertising man Ludwig Wolfgang Frohlich, who founded IMS Health, the worldâs dominant health-data miner, in the 1950s. IMS Health now gathers patient medical data from more than 45 billion transactions annually from 780,000 data feeds in more than 100 countries. Our Bodies, Our Data uncovers some of Frohlichâs hidden past and follows the story of what happened in the following decades. This is both a story about medicine and medical practice, and about big business and maximizing profits, and the places these meet, places most patients would like to believe are off-limits.
Our Bodies, Our Data seeks to spark debate on how we can best balance the promise big data offers to advance medicine and improve lives while preserving the rights and interests of every patient. We, the public, deserve a say in this discussion. After all, itâs our data.