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Privacy Perspectives | Leveraging medical claims data while safeguarding consumer privacy Related reading: Overview of global AI governance law and policy — Part 2: UK

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The big-data-consumer-privacy paradigm has been on shifting sands for the last ten years — and most people still aren’t certain whether they understand the value proposition of big data in the health care environment. This is especially true when we introduce protected health information into that dialogue. 

The concerns are real. According to reports released earlier this year — in the wake of the OPM data breach — the black market is oversaturated with credit card data. And financial institutions are more readily identifying cybercrimes before direct financial losses are incurred by consumers.

Fraudsters are therefore turning elsewhere. For example, they may steal PHI to create false payer-provider member data that they then use to purchase goods or equipment for resale. In today’s market, medical records reportedly can fetch up to ten times more than a credit card on the black market, and identity theft has become a reality for millions of Americans.  

With that in mind, it is understandable that when determining whether using PHI to develop big data analytics outweighs the risk, there are very few certainties. Certainties — such as current federal and state privacy, security and consumer regulations — most assuredly exist to protect individuals from these aforementioned “bad guys.” More often than not, however, there is a good deal of ambiguity concerning the protection of PHI, particularly while utilizing that data to improve clinical outcomes and administrative inefficiencies within our newly regulated health care system.

If you believed that properly secured PHI could help solve for clinical outreach to underserved populations within the U.S., what value would you place on that record? 

We believe – and we have demonstrated from our expertise and experience with clinical analytics – that utilizing medical claims data within a HIPAA-compliance framework creates measurably improved clinical outcomes without jeopardizing individual privacy. We can balance big data with health care privacy, and there is no time like the present for improving our health care system for individuals, payers, and providers alike. 

Our personally identifiable information has long been in use by credit bureaus, law enforcement, and pay-per-click advertisers, to name a few. The risks to individual privacy in these fields are regulated to some degree by the FTC, FACTA, state privacy statutes, opt-out provisions, and privacy guidelines. However where we are primarily discussing PHI, HIPAA is not a roadblock – but rather the lynchpin to success. Few of the other checks-and-balances come close to the protection afforded to consumers by HIPAA.

HIPAA plays a critical role in the value proposition of these big data platforms.  

It ensures that our PHI is used to make health care treatment, research and development, and associated administrative processes possible while effectively prohibiting any other use of PHI. In addition to the litany of data privacy and security requirements, HIPAA mandates aggregation and/or de-identification of data.

The term “de-identification” is often interchanged with “redaction”, “pseudonymization,” and “anonymization.” Here, though, we refer to “de-identification” as a process through which we anonymize data that would otherwise constitute PHI under HIPAA. De-identification helps leverage medical claims data assets in such a manner as to remove the association between the identifying dataset and the data subject. This way, we can help our payer – provider customers understand the predicative capability of health care analytics – without incurring the risk of injury to the individual consumer.

One method of de-identification is established by removing upwards of 18 direct identifiers of the individual or of relatives, employers, or household members. De-identification may also be established via statistical certification, which effectively establishes that the risk of re-linking or re-identification is extremely low — e.g., less than 0.5 percent. All clinical analytics models can and should be HIPAA-certified to protect privacy while gaining greater insight into patient population patterns, avoidable cost opportunities, and potential patient outcomes.

Once we understand the HIPAA “opportunity,” we see that health care analytics provides the most promise in creating meaningful clinical and financial results for consumers. Whether through a health plan member portal or EHR, once an insurer, payer or provider has access to fully vetted and contextualized medical claims data, they are well positioned to help their members, patients, and – more generally – society. 

Consider its ability to:

  • Improve clinical outcomes such as addressing why 20 percent of the population does not come back for follow-up visits or fill their prescriptions.
  • Enhance participation in wellness-management programs through effective outreach based on behaviors and preferences.
  • Reduce avoidable costs by identifying actions or treatment plans that reduce complications or the continuation of adverse outcomes.
  • Assign clinicians to help target the patients most likely to benefit from population health intervention.
  • Develop programs to focus medical management resources on the specific diseases/processes that most impact future costs.
  • Minimize fraud, waste and abuse by identifying practitioner anomalies — e.g., an orthopedic surgeon overprescribing Xanax or controlled substances in clusters.
  • Enabling insurers and pharmacists to identify centers of excellence, measure quality assurance metrics, reduce expenses, and reduce individual insurance premiums accordingly.Smith_healthcare-image

That ability – that insight into our health care system – is the tremendous opportunity that leveraging big data in health care offers consumers. 

There is an innovative opportunity on the horizon – the capability to determine potential unfavorable outcomes for patients while they are still in the hospital. By taking the existing data on the patient from as many sources as possible, including lab results, pharmacy history, patient-specific data, physician notes, nursing notes, and so on, and assembling them into the EMR, then using this data combined with the historical data for this patient and other patients, it is possible to forecast the likelihood of re-admission within 31 days, post-discharge infection, or any of several other possible outcomes.

Armed with this foreknowledge, the case manager can intervene prior to the discharge of the patient to effectively eliminate or reduce the likelihood of the potentially unfavorable outcome by proper pre-release education or other interventions. Further, this allows the case manager to be more focused on follow-up visits and to react to indications of non-compliance or other mitigating circumstances. The innovation here is the use of big data and analytics to develop an application that can perform near real-time forecasting to patient’s data during their admission.

Ultimately, it may be a concern for privacy activists and spectators on Capitol Hill, but I believe that our commitment to both protecting individual privacy and to advancing data analytics in health care is paramount to the success of our evolving health care system.

photo credit: via photopin (license)

1 Comment

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  • comment Annie Bai • Mar 30, 2016
    This article could be entitled "Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too."  Meaning, PHI, of course.  It's a good, positive-sum attitude towards the use of PHI for the larger good of improving societal health, and reminds me of efforts to reduce avoidable hospital use, e.g New York City's DSRIP Program.