Hospitals are increasingly being approached by startups asking them to sell access to their data, CNBC reports.
CNBC notes that hospitals have access to tons of data — on patients' health, medication use, and imaging results, for instance — that software developers can use to develop and refine models to spot patterns and potentially be applied to improve healthcare. But it also, it says, could be used to find people who are at risk of disease and raise their insurance rates or advertise directly to them.
And so, Aaron Miri, the chief information officer at Dell Medical School and University of Texas Health, tells CNBC that hospitals need to be careful about the data they do share and how their partners intend to use it. Additionally, CNBC notes that recent studies have found that de-identified data doesn't necessarily stay that way.
"I don't believe that most people are in it for the wrong reason, but it's often not easy to make heads or tails of what's legitimate and what isn't, and the real intention behind it," Miri tells it.