This brings up one big issue, something I have been aware of for a while, collecting data for one purpose and being used for another, think this doesn't happen, think again. When you sign up for health insurance, you sign you life away for all this data to be collected and reviewed for the process of qualifying for health insurance. Ingenix is a division of United Healthcare and one company who does this with profits of over 1 billion last year.
How do you stay out of the data bases, go pay cash, preferably for a $4.00 generic if available. If you have a cholesterol problem and you are
taking a high dose, it will show up as well as any other prescriptions one is taking, so thus when you go to apply, if you have monthly bills in excess of $500.00 let's say for round figures, well what do you think the outcome might be?
The next step is developing the same type of service for labs, so where's the privacy? Again, the only thing one can do is pay cash to keep the records private. The information is easier to get and analyze as compared to medical records at present. Health insurance is not only expensive these days, but it also costs you in the privacy department. Where will the mined data go next and what about HIPAA revisions? BD
Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.
Ingenix, a Minnesota-based health information services company that had $1.3 billion in sales last year -- and Wisconsin-based rival Milliman -- say the drug profiles are an accurate, less expensive alternative to seeking physician records, which can take months and hundreds of dollars to obtain. They note that consumers authorize the data release and that the services can save insurance companies millions of dollars and benefit consumers anxious for a decision.
Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers - washingtonpost.com
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