MedCity Influencers, Sponsored Post

CreateHealth.io rallies global audience to discuss health data sharing

With so much hype surrounding the risks, opportunity and nuance to ‘big data’ in health, CreateHealth has built an online discussion to provide a levelled conversation around the real world application, pitfalls and opportunity with patient held health information.

This post is sponsored by CreateHealth.io.

With so much hype surrounding the risks, opportunity and nuance to ‘big data’in health, CreateHealth has built an online discussion to provide a levelled conversation around the real world application, pitfalls and opportunity with patient held health information.

You can join, and contribute to the discussion with global HIT companies, the NHS, and big pharma here http://app.createhealth.io/user/sign_up

While the merits of shared data for research are clear:

For example the UK healthcare regulator already shares health data, in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), which holds millions of people’s records. This has, on the most part, been well managed.

The potential to advance medical research is well defined: Most recently IBM began working in partnership with US hospitals to test whether Watson, the computer that won on Jeopardy, can sift through the genomes of cancer patients and help doctors pick drugs. This effort could hold the key to making DNA sequencing for cancer affordable.

Vast archives of medical research on cancer, heart disease and more already prove that in medicine, data saves lives.

But we face challenges with sharing data:

The NSA leaks showed us that governments can help themselves to supposedly private data. Agency staff can lose or leak data too.

And did you know that hospitals are regularly fined for:

  • Selling computers without first clearing the hard drive which contains patient data.
  • Vacating buildings and leaving filing cabinets containing patient records still inside.
  • Losing laptops/hard drives containing patient records.

On top of this re-identifying individuals via their health data is not impossible. Key de-identified elements of your record when coupled with identifiable features from outside your health record (age, residence etc. on Facebook) means that people with malicious intent can identify individuals.

Saying that, this kind of illegal access to personal health records carries a fine, but is that enough?

Given these challenges, and many, many more how do you think healthcare organisations should approach data sharing?

You can join, and contribute to the discussion with global HIT companies, the NHS, and big pharma here http://app.createhealth.io/user/sign_up


CreateHealth.io

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