How Can Public Health Data Be Sold to Private Companies?

A recent article about the difficulty of tracking non-lethal drug overdoses contained this detail: “Hospital data isn’t easily acquired. The data is typically sold to private companies, which then resell it to researchers.” Sold to private companies? How is public health data a commodity to be profited from? —How Can This Be

I understand the temptation to stereotype all big corporations as rapacious money-grubbers, How, but the health care sector is different—after all, its core business is saving lives. Rather than rushing willy-nilly to profit when some morally questionable opportunity comes along, you’ll find most health care firms will pause, take a step back, and ask themselves the only question that really matters: “Can we definitely make money off this?”

It may sound gross to buy, sell or trade Grandma’s chemo records like so many Pokémon cards. But when you think about it, it’s really no more reprehensible than letting the market set the price for lifesaving drugs, spending more to cure chapped lips than malaria, or having de facto tiered care levels based on socio-economic status—in other words, pretty goddamn reprehensible. But all those ships (and more besides) sailed long ago, when America committed to a for-profit health care system.

Once you accept that original sin, what the hospitals do with their data more or less makes sense. Hospitals run on money, and without a British-style subsidy from the government, American hospitals are left to scramble for revenue wherever they can get it. Selling it to third-party companies is just one more way to stay in the black.

“Screw that!” I hear you saying. “Public health data isn’t the hospitals’ to sell!” That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s important to remember that the hospitals aren’t selling something they could be giving away for free if only they weren’t such dirty chiselers. For a lot of reasons—most notably privacy concerns—hospitals couldn’t upload their raw, unprocessed records to the cloud for the public good even if they wanted to.

Sure, they could take the time to anonymize and organize the data to make it a useful public resource—but that’s a money loser, not a moneymaker. Better, from the hospitals’ point of view, to sell the data to a company that specializes in cleaning it up and aggregating it with data from other hospitals so it can be useful to the next Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, or Jonas Salk (assuming they have the price of admission).

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.