A new survey suggests that consumers are getting more open-minded about sharing their personal health data. A whopping 90 percent of the 1,000 respondents to the Makovsky Health/Kelton Survey said they would have no problem sharing their healthcare data so long as the goal is to help researchers understand a disease or improve care or treatment options.
This is what the breakdown looked like:
26 percent would share their data regardless of whether it were anonymous.
23 percent would share their data if they could control which data were anonymous.
40 percent would share if promised that all data would remain anonymous.
It’s a big validation for e startups that have built this assumption into their platforms already. By extracting data from wearables or apps, they want to give physicians the tools to assess patient progress beyond the four walls of the doctor’s office.
Case in point, @Point of Care — a health IT company that’s part of StartUp Health’s portfolio. The health IT company created a mobile platform to make sharing patient-generated data with clinicians from patients’ mobile apps easier. About 17,000 patients with multiple sclerosis use its app to improve understanding of their condition and to convey information on adherence and biometrics to physicians. In a chat at the Digital Health Innovation in Context conference, co-founder Sandeep Pulim said it’s working with two ACOs which are interested in linking the apps to a patient portal. Payers are attracted to the business as it helps providers with quality improvement. CEO Robert Stern founded MedPage Today and it was sold to Everyday Health in 2010.
There was also some good news for pharma marketers in the survey. More than one in three respondents said they would trust a disease website sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. A provider’s recommendation drove more than half of those visits followed by a peer’s recommendation. If the respondent was cool with sharing personal health data, it significantly increased the likelihood they would visit those websites.
