The previous part of this article raised the question of whether data brokering in health care is responsible for raising or lower costs. My argument that it increases costs looks at three common targets for marketing:
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Patients, who are targeted by clinicians for treatments they may not need or have thought of
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Doctors, who are directed by pharma companies toward expensive drugs that might not pay off in effectiveness
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Payers, who pay more for diagnoses and procedures because analytics help doctors maximize charges
Tanner flags the pharma industry for selling drugs that perform no better than cheaper alternatives (Chapter 13, page 146), and even drugs that are barely effective at all despite having undergone clinical trials. Anyway, Tanner cites Hong Kong and Europe as places far more protective of personal data than the United States (Chapter 14, page 152), and they don’t suffer higher health care costs–quite the contrary.
Strangely, there is no real evidence so far that data sales have produced either harm to patients or treatment breakthroughs (Conclusion, 163). But the supermarket analogy does open up the possibility that patients could be induced to share anonymized data voluntarily by being reimbursed for it (Chapter 14, page 157). I have heard this idea aired many times, and it fits with the larger movement called Vendor Relationship Management. The problem with such ideas is the close horizon limiting our vision in a fast-moving technological world. People can probably understand and agree to share data for particular research projects, with or without financial reimbursement. But many researchers keep data for decades and recombine it with other data sets for unanticipated projects. If patients are to sign open-ended, long-term agreements, how can they judge the potential benefits and potential risks of releasing their data?
Data for sale, but not for treatment
In Chapter 11, Tanner takes up the perennial question of patient activists: why can drug companies get detailed reports on patient conditions and medications, but my specialist has to repeat a test on me because she can’t get my records from the doctor who referred me to her? Tanner mercifully shields here from the technical arguments behind this question–sparing us, for instance, a detailed discussion of vagaries in HL7 specifications or workflow issues in the use of Health Information Exchanges–but strongly suggests that the problem lies with the motivations of health care providers, not with technical interoperability.
And this makes sense. Doctors do not have to engage in explicit “blocking” (a slippery term) to keep data away from fellow practitioners. For a long time they were used to just saying “no” to requests for data, even after that was made illegal by HIPAA. But their obstruction is facilitated by vendors equally uninterested in data exchange. Here Tanner discards his usual pugilistic journalism and gives Judy Faulkner an easy time of it (perhaps because she was a rare CEO polite enough to talk to him, and also because she expressed an ethical aversion to sharing patient data) and doesn’t air such facts as the incompatibilities between different Epic installations, Epic’s tendency to exchange records only with other Epic installations, and the difficulties it introduces toward companies that want to interconnect.
Tanner does not address a revolution in data storage that many patient advocates have called for, which would at one stroke address both the Chapter 11 problem of patient access to data and the book’s larger critique of data selling: storing the data at a site controlled by the patient. If the patient determined who got access to data, she would simply open it to each new specialist or team she encounters. She could also grant access to researchers and even, if she chooses, to marketers.
What we can learn from Chapter 9 (although Tanner does not tell us this) is that health care organizations are poorly prepared to protect data. In this woeful weakness they are just like TJX (owner of the T.J. Maxx stores), major financial institutions, and the Democratic National Committee. All of these leading institutions have suffered breaches enabled by weak computer security. Patients and doctors may feel reluctant to put data online in the current environment of vulnerability, but there is nothing special about the health care field that makes it more vulnerable than other institutions. Here again, storing the data with the individual patient may break it into smaller components and therefore make it harder for attackers to find.
Patient health records present new challenges, but the technology is in place and the industry can develop consent mechanisms to smooth out the processes for data exchange. Furthermore, some data will still remain with the labs and pharmacies that have to collect it for financial reasons, and the Supreme Court has given them the right to market that data.
So we are left with ambiguities throughout the area of health data collection. There are few clear paths forward and many trade-offs to make. In this I agree ultimately with Tanner. He said that his book was meant to open a discussion. Among many of us, the discussion has already started, and Tanner provides valuable input.
