Healthcare Analytics is a Big Privacy Issue

Coming out of HIMSS, everyone said that healthcare analytics was a major discussion. I talked to someone from Allscripts today and they quoted me that something like 42% of their business is coming from population health (analytics, patient portal, and HIE) functionality. Today someone else told me that the future of healthcare IT is going to really be around analytics and how we use the data. When you think about future revenue streams, the data is likely going to be the center of most business models.

Analytics is going to play a major role in the future of health IT and I believe will lead to really important improves in the care patients receive. My guess is that one day we’ll look back on the EHR of today and wonder how we saw patients with such limited data and intelligence built into the EHR.

However, Sheri Stoltenberg from Stoltenberg Consulting made a great comment to me at HIMSS which is the title of this blog post: Healthcare Analytics is a Big Privacy Issue.

While we love to talk about the benefits of big healthcare data and the value of healthcare analytics, it’s also got a lot of big privacy issues that I think we’re going to need to address. Many will argue that we already have HIPAA and that should be enough. Certainly it will provide the framework for privacy and security of healthcare data and analytics. However, that’s likely going to need to evolve as the healthcare analytics involves. I’m not sure we even know the issues that healthcare analytics will pose to privacy in 5 years. Unfortunately, I don’t see HIPAA being able to keep up with it.

If the healthcare IT industry were smart, it would start working together and appropriate privacy and security within healthcare analytics. If they don’t, be ready for the government to step in and impose it on them. We know how that usually works out.

Hopefully this blog post will be inspiration for every organization to consider the privacy and security issues associated with their healthcare analytics.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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