Yes United probably makes more money selling data out 
there than most do as it started years ago with Ingenix and they have a a full set of analytics where they sell data. It started out selling prescription data and has grown big time since then. Managing care and selling data are two big profit areas for the company. United is so very large they have so many subsidiaries from a company in China that promotes Chinese drugs and devices to low income housing investments and cheap hearing aids that are sometimes used to entice seniors to sign up for their Secure Horizons plans in areas such as Florida.
United HealthCare Issues Another Study, This One Telling Government To Aggressively Manage Medical Care For Seniors-An Area Where A Large Chunk of Their Revenue Comes From Today, Managing Care
United Healthcare Wants to Expand Predictive Modeling for Medicare and Medicaid–Billions in Savings Predicted in Report Only As Good as the Day It Is Published
The company looks for savings in many areas such as cutting compensation for doctors and perhaps that goes towards some of the money for some of these very large purchases and this one is said to be worth several millions. See why I keep saying “excise tax the data sellers” here’s a huge one here. Recently United also told Medicare they know how to manage and propose aggressive senior care management as they have already sued the DOD and won the Tri-Care contract (military Medicare) in the west with using their stance of their “superior” algorithms.
The AAFP Confronts United Healthcare On Reimbursements, Some Are Below Medicare Rates In Parts of the US–Payment Algorithms/Formulas Calculated Deep Within IT Infrastructures Do the Job
UnitedHealthCare Looks at Doctor’s Pay for Savings, Nothing New There Been Doing It for Years But Keep In Mind We Have the Annual Medicare Cut Fix on the Floor Again with Congress–Timing?
We also have another big organization called the MIB that collects and sells data and all the major insurers participate and exchange data here too. They tell insurers when you are expected to die. Managing and fiddling with risk has been the Achilles heal of healthcare as people use numbers and stats to form opinions and decisions and some are accurate and others only have a profit mode. So what will United do here? The managed risk and cost by short paying doctors for 15 years, where they were fined but it was still analytics. So when shareholders are the prime interest at times we don’t know what the model is and can’t check the math. That’s a big problem today and I look good solutions that are accurate but I have seen too many that are marketed as good and have them be flawed for profits only. You can watch insurers with claims adjust the parameters of what gets paid if the public screams too loud and when it dies down they roll the parameters of what gets paid right back up, it’s a numbers game.
Hiding, Falsifying, And Accelerating Risk Has Become the Achilles Heel of the US Economy As the “Real” World” Clashes With the Values Created From a World of “Fictional Values” Of Formulas and Math
We might stand a good chance here with the information staying pure as we have Dr. Halamka at Harvard on the Scientific Advisory board. With the recent announcement with Mayo, I guess Humedica will be able to package up the non identified data and sell it to pharmaceutical, device companies and others. Bain Capital is in here so looks like Romney made some more money.
Big Data/Analytics If Used Out of Context and Without True Values Stand To Be A Huge Discriminatory Practice Against Consumers–More Honest Data Scientists Needed to Formulate Accuracy/Value To Keep Algo Duping For Profit Out of the Game
Humedica uses a portal service for the hospital analytics and the information sold from EMR records can show which products are doing better, worse, etc. The intelligence will be there but not big savings like everyone thinks as you get a new left curve every day that takes what you saved yesterday and spends it today. What hospitals save here may be eaten up with Medicare re-admission fines or other such items. With complex algorithms and analytics we get smarter but the huge savings they all look for are illusional. Pharma and device companies now have another area to spend more of their money in buying the data to see the results.
So what in healthcare do they not have an interest? How much longer I wonder before the word divest might enter the picture? Even the VA pays United for the anesthesia analytics from Picis as they company was in there before United bought them.
If you are using an Epic medical records system, United wants some of that money too with creating a brand new subsidiary in 2011 to integrate with the EHR and this will put smaller clearinghouses out of business. Of course they still have their original “Ingenix” clearinghouse services too.
OptumInsight (A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of United HealthCare Optum Division) Creates Medical Clearinghouse Integrated With Epic Practice Management Software-Subsidiary Watch
The company can help and consult with a drug or device company to get it sent through the FDA with their Canreg subsidiary. How does this work now with selling information to the same types of industries?
United Healthcare (Optum) Owns A Consulting Firm for FDA Drug and Device Approvals, Clinical Trials–CanReg - Subsidiary Watch
Anyway one more point to be made here again, license and tax all data sellers in the US soon as they make billions selling data as Walgreen in 2010 made short of $800 million selling data
to get a grip on how much will be made with Humedica selling the non identified data from the EMRs, a lot. Money has to come from somewhere to pay the pharmacists in certain parts of the US who work for Walgreen the pay for performance money United dishes out for those who enroll patients in one of United’s service to include the YMCA. Would you buy an EHR from them? They have about three to include a couple they acquired in a couple other company purchases:)
Ingenix (Subsidiary of United Health Group) Marketing Care Tracker EHR To Community Health Centers–Subsidiary Watch
Some of their affiliations or companies they own have access to data from consumer devices that will “push’ compliance and I think education instead of the route this company goes is better. Remember they are bought and sold on Wall Street and are part of that entire game and some things are good while others get marketed and sugar coated to get consumers to buy in.
United Healthcare To Begin Using CareSpeak Text Messaging for CareGiver Alerts and to Push Compliance With Requested Responses
Stephen Hemsley, the CEO of UnitedHealth, "Leading companies take advantage of disruptive change in the marketplace," he told reporters recently. "Our shareholders will prosper."
Last but not least the man who worked for HHS and is accredited with writing most of Obamacare now sits at United so when you want to pick on Obamacare look to United I guess. Think they control a big chunk of healthcare and ram their analytics every direction they can..
US Health Insurance Regulator Leaving to Take a Job at UnitedHealth Care As Vice President of the Optum Division – Moving to the “For Profit Side” With Business Intelligence Algorithm Dollars To Review
Humedica also lists Allscripts as one of their partners…if they get their code done and new aggregated product out there and hopefully won’t be suing anyone else over sour grapes over not getting a contract:)
Anceta, the subsidiary of the AMA is
in there too as a partner, so if you read this far you know the AMA has subsidiaries in the data business too and they sell data and that’s partially how they stay alive as Humedica might be buying data from them too or vice versa.
Humedica also has a banker in there too with Leerink Swann so this is posed to make money and now they have United analytics and data if they want to add more, as subdiaries of big corporations certainly share an sell tons of data. So if you have read this far, take a look at this post, part of the Attack of the Killer Algorithm series…
“Devaluate the Algorithm” And “Tax the Data Sellers”–A Cure for Both Healthcare and an Economy Based Heavily on Intangibles–We’ve Lost Our Balance
Attack of the Killer Algorithms–Digest & Links for All Chapters–How Math and Crafty Formulas Today Running on Servers 24/7 Make Life Impacting Decisions About You
We like data to make us smarter but publicly trading companies as the CEO of United said above, shareholders will prosper. Personally myself I like the Kaiser Permanente registry efforts a lot better than this and they are non profit. BD
The deal is valued in the hundreds of millions, according to one source, and represents a significant payday for a large consortium of local
venture investors including Bain Capital Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners. Boston investment bank Leerink Swann and the Kraft Group, a consortium of businesses including a private equity arm as well as the New England Patriots, also are investors in Humedica.
The company, which has raised at least $63 million and was incubated at Leerink Swann before its 2009 launch, produces health analytics tools for hospitals, physician practices and life sciences companies that aggregate raw health data.
The company has not publicly disclosed its number of employees.
Humedica's products include Humedica MinedShare, a platform that enables clinical, operational, and financial benchmarking across the continuum of care and Humedica MinedStream, a real-time predictive clinical surveillance system that identifies high-risk and high-cost patients.
My gosh you're a nutbag. Aside from the usual factual inaccuracies you spew, I can't even follow your train of thought through this diatribe. Love the part on KP being non-profit so somehow that makes them good (their medical groups are for profit btw). That would make every Blues plan out there somehow noble as well.
ReplyDeleteBottom line: at least someone is doing something novel to try to address the cost/quality challenge we have in healthcare. Partnering with Mayo and using the best tools out there seems like a good start.
You can read the same thing on Modern Health care and in Forbes specifically to the data selling, Walgreen made short of $800 million selling us in 2010. It's not the government who is behind we need to worry about, it's corporate USA. United could care less on the data, as long as they can sell it. A friend the other day was shocked when they found out that their doctor at Cedars was part of a medical group controlled by United. Talk to someone who is insured by them or better yet a doctor.
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