Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data

Jaret, Peter. "Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data." The New York Times, January 14, 2013. 

From the article: "Over the past decade, nudged by new federal regulations, hospitals and medical offices around the country have been converting scribbled doctors’ notes to electronic records. Although the chief goal has been to improve efficiency and cut costs, a disappointing report published last week by the RAND Corp. found that electronic health records actually may beraising the nation’s medical bills.

But the report neglected one powerful incentive for the switch to electronic records: the resulting databases of clinical information are gold mines for medical research. The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials." Read more 

Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data

Klarreich, Erica. "Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data." Scientific American, December 31, 2012. 

From the article: "A mathematical technique called “differential privacy” gives researchers access to vast repositories of personal data while meeting a high standard for privacy protection… A differentially private data release algorithm allows researchers to ask practically any question about a database of sensitive information and provides answers that have been “blurred” so that they reveal virtually nothing about any individual’s data — not even whether the individual was in the database in the first place." Read more

FTC Launches Probe of Data Broker Privacy Practices

Bachman, Katy. "FTC Launches Probe of Data Broker Privacy Practices." Adweek, December 18, 2012.   

From the article: "Last week's Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus briefing on data brokers and privacy must have left quite an impression on Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, who opened a probe today to study the privacy practices of the data broker industry.

The agency issued orders to nine data brokerages to provide information to the FTC about how they collect and use data about consumers by Feb. 1. Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, Peekyou, Rapleaf and Record Future all received the 15-page order." Read more

Hospitals Use Patient Data to Target Ads

Sutherly, Ben. "Hospitals Use Patient Data to Target Ads." The Columbus Dispatch, November 12, 2012.

From the article: "You might not know it when you seek care from some of central Ohio’s hospital systems, but your health information makes you a potential marketing target.

OhioHealth and Mount Carmel Health System routinely mine health data from their patients’ records to decide who should receive certain mailings. The approach — sometimes called “ customer-relationship management” — has been used for six years by OhioHealth and two years by Mount Carmel. Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center hasn’t used it, but it plans to take another look at the tactic soon, a spokesman said." Read more

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win

Scherer, Michael. "Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win." Time, November 7, 2012. 

From the article: "Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data." Read more

MasterCard Mines Purchase Data For Analytics

Davis, Wendy. "MasterCard Mines Purchase Data For Analytics." MediaPost, October 17, 2012.

From the article: "Credit card giant MasterCard has rolled out a new analytics offering that draws on purchase data to predict buying patterns. The company is offering that analysis to BlueKai, which can make it available to ad networks through its platform.

For the initiative, MasterCard is mining data from 34 billion annual transactions. The company then sifts through aggregated, anonymous data to figure out how that activity can predict people's propensity to make certain kinds of future purchases -- such as meals in restaurants." Read more

Data from Health Care Reviews Could Power “Yelp for Health Care” Startups

Howard, Alex. "Data from Health Care Reviews Could Power 'Yelp for Health Care' Startups." O'Reilly Radar, October 17, 2012. 

From the article: "Combining patients review data with government-collected performance data could be quite powerful in helping to drive better decisions and adding more transparency to health care. 

… More data collected by patients, advocates, governments and industry could help to shed light on the performance of more physicians and clinics engaged in other expensive and lifesaving surgeries and associated outcomes. 

Should that be extrapolated across the medical industry, it’s a safe bet that some medical practices or physicians will use whatever tools or legislative influence they have to fight or discredit websites, services or data that puts them in a poor light. This might parallel the reception that Bright Scope’s profiles of financial advisors have received in industry." Read more

Big Data: The End of Privacy or a New Beginning?

Rubinstein, Ira. "Big Data: The End of Privacy or a New Beginning?" New York University, Information Law Institute, October 5, 2012.

From the report: "'Big data' refers to novel ways in which organizations, including government and businesses, combine diverse digital data sets and then use statistics and other data mining techniques to extract from them both hidden information and surprising correlations. While big data promises significant economic and social benefits, it also raises serious privacy concerns. In particular, big data challenges the Fair Information Practices (FIPs) as embodied in various privacy laws including the EU Data Protection Directive. This past January, the European Commission released a proposal to reform and replace the Directive by adopting a new Regulation. In this paper, I argue that this Regulation relies too heavily on the discredited informed choice model, and therefore fails to fully engage with the coming big data tsunami. My contention is that when this advancing wave arrives, it will so overwhelm the core privacy principles of informed choice and data minimization on which the Directive rests that reform efforts alone will prove inadequate. Rather, an adequate response must combine legal reform with encouragement of new business models premised on consumer empowerment and supported by a personal data ecosystem. This new business model is important for two reasons: first, existing business models have proven time and again that privacy regulation is no match for them. Businesses inevitably collect and use more and more personal data, and while consumers realize many benefits in exchange, there is little doubt that businesses, not consumers, control the market in personal data with their own interests in mind. Second, a new business model, which I describe in this paper, promises to stand processing of personal data on its head by shifting control over both the collection and use of data from firms to individuals. This “control shift” — and this alone — stands a chance of making the FIPs efficacious by giving individuals the capacity to benefit from big data and hence the motivation to learn about and control how their data is collected and used, while also enabling businesses to profit from a new breed of services that are both data-intensive and imbued with privacy values." Read more

Senator Opens Investigation of Data Brokers

Singer, Natasha. "Senator Opens Investigation of Data Brokers." The New York Times, October 10, 2012.

From the article: "The multibillion-dollar data brokerage industry, a growing force in online marketing, is drawing intensified government scrutiny. 

On Wednesday, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, opened an extensive investigation of nine leading information brokers. Because Americans now conduct much of their daily business online, the senator said he was concerned that “an unprecedented amount” of personal, medical and financial information about people could be collected, mined and sold, to the potential detriment of consumers." Read more

Automated Prediction: Perception, Law, and Policy

Zarsky, Tal. "Automated Prediction: Perception, Law, and Policy (September 1, 2012). Communications of the ACM, Volume 55, Number 9, September 2012, p. 33-35.

From the abstract:  "Governments are now using automated prediction for a wide range of tasks, from insider trading detection to fighting and preventing violent crimes and terrorist attacks. Automated predictions are considered problematic and even frightening by a large segment of the public. This common visceral response is not always rational and accurate, yet it is backed by several relevant legal concepts. However, automated prediction deserves a closer look, given the fact that it limits the role of human discretion, and thus of hidden biases. Therefore, automated predictions might promote important social objectives, such as equality and fairness.

This short "Viewpoint" addresses the disparity between data mining's hidden benefits, and its negative perception in public opinion. It concludes that automated prediction should have a more significant role in modern government. Therefore, legal impediments blocking some of these practices should be rethought and perhaps removed." Read more