Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our

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Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records

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 treatmentâ€”the reason medical data exists in the first placeâ€”remain 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 worldâ€™s 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 Frohlichâ€™s 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, itâ€™s our data.
Country USA
Brand Beacon Press
Manufacturer Beacon Press
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 0807033340_used
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2017-01-10
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780807033340

Country	USA
Brand	Beacon Press
Manufacturer	Beacon Press
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	0807033340_used
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2017-01-10
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780807033340

Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records

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