This one clause may have impacted this decision to allow Medicare information to be used - “Shareholders”. If any future decisions should change, again, in my opinion, this is better handled by a “non profit” organization so companies as such who have to report and distribute to their investors don’t end up in a conflict of interest with the hopes of marketing such data base information. It’s a big question in many other areas of healthcare, how can you provide information that is truly to help the advancement of healthcare reporting, and yet have a loyalty to shareholders first? There’s a lot of companies making some very large dollars buying and selling healthcare information around. BD
I am guessing this is probably not the last company who will make an attempt to have the availability of mining Medicare data, but again in the business world we operate within today we do have to ask, is this for marketing gain or does it overall contribute to better healthcare, as this company appeared to see this as a fit to run their algorithms to perhaps market and sell to others, remember there are “shareholders” here that drive a lot of these business intelligence decisions relative to marketing. Read the last statement here if you will, the purpose was to sell data. BD
The urge by some to delve into Medicare data and use it for purposes for which it was never intended, and should not be released, is neither new nor likely to go away.
Even with attempts to get this information previously rebuffed, there may be new ways to ask the question, and the motivation will be particularly strong if there is potential profit in the answer. A recent unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta demonstrates both what's at risk and what the AMA has accomplished to protect physician privacy.
At issue was a case brought by Real Time Medical Data and its partner, Jennifer Alley, that would have effectively opened the books on how much individual physicians are getting paid by Medicare. Filing under the Freedom of Information Act, the plaintiffs wanted physicians' names and addresses matched with the procedures they performed, and with the Current Procedural Terminology codes associated with those procedures. The stated purpose was to sell that data to hospitals, physicians' offices and others.
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