Mind you, there are laws that prevent employers from looking into HIPAA-protected health data, but not Acxiom data, which is entirely unregulated. And if we “opened up all the data” then the laws would be entirely moot. It would be a world where, to get a job, the employer got to see everything about you, including your future health profile. To some extent this is already happening.
There have been two articles very recently about how great health data mining could be if we could only link up all the data sets. Larry Page from Google thinks so, which doesn’t surprise anyone, and separately we are seeing that the consequence of the new medical payment system through the ACA is giving medical systems incentives to keep tabs on you through data providers and find out if you’re smoking or if you need to fill up on asthma medication.
And although many would consider this creepy stalking, that’s not actually my problem with it. I think Larry Page is right – we might be able to save lots of lives if we could mine this data which is currently siloed through various privacy laws. On the other hand, there are reasons those privacy laws exist. Let’s think about that for a second.
Now that we have the ACA, insurers are not…
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