Eli Richman reports:
Would you sell your own healthcare data to a private company? What if it could help them discover a new treatment? What if you were poor and desperate for income?
Those are the questions patients are faced with in the new world of protected health information (PHI) marketplaces. Data brokers have long bought deidentified data from healthcare organizations, but recently, firms have begun going outside the traditional healthcare system and offering to pay patients directly for their data.
These offers put patients in a tough position. On the one hand, people are almost never offered money for their own data—usually data are sold by a third party, like Facebook or a hospital. And the prospect of getting cash in exchange for something intangible like data could be very attractive to someone who’s very sick and/or under tight budget constraints.
Read more on FierceHealthcare.
via @SheilaLKaplan