Hospital execs say they are getting flooded with requests for your health data

Hospitals, many of which are increasingly in dire financial straits, are weighing a lucrative new opportunity: selling patient health information to tech companies.

Aaron Miri is chief information officer at Dell Medical School and University of Texas Health in Austin, so he gets plenty of tech start-ups approaching him to pitch deals and partnerships. Five years ago, he’d get about one pitch per quarter. But these days, with huge data-driven players like Amazon and Google making incursions into the health space, and venture money flooding into Silicon Valley start-ups aiming to bring machine learning to health care, the cadence is far more frequent.

“It’s all the time,” he said via phone. “Often, once a day or more.”

Hospitals have access to vast amounts of people’s health information, including lab and imaging results and medication lists. This data can help software programmers train their systems to recognize patterns that in turn can lead to better care. For example, it can help recognize signs of disease to make a diagnosis. But health systems administrators say it could also be used in unintended or harmful ways, like being cross-referenced with other data to identify individuals at higher risk of diseases and then raise their health premiums, or to target advertising to individuals.

The full CNBC article can be viewed at this link.