How third parties harvest health data from providers, payers and pharmacies
Skip to main content
MDHC_Logotype_white
Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Login
  • Subscribe
  • News
    • This Week's News
    • COVID-19
    • Providers
    • Insurance
    • Government
    • Finance
    • Technology
    • Safety & Quality
    • People
    • Regional News
    • Digital Edition
    • HHS Secretary Alex Azar resigns
      CMS will raise Medicare Advantage plan payments by 4.08% in 2022
      Federal regulators ask insurers for claims data
      Cone Health CEO, CFO to depart amid pending Sentara merger
    • Biden unveils $1.9T plan to stem virus and steady economy
      Nursing home staff COVID-19 vaccination: A work in progress
      California hospitals prepare ethical protocol to prioritize lifesaving care
      Expanded vaccine rollout in U.S. spawns a new set of problems
    • The Check Up: Trenda Ray
      The Check Up: Trenda Ray of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
      Trenda Ray
      Q&A: Arkansas nursing leader looking for creative staffing solutions as COVID cases surge
      Cook Lydia 4x6_i.jpg
      Northeast Ohio health systems increase community benefit values in 2019
      Vaccine rollout hits snag as health workers balk at shots
    • CMS approves rule forcing insurers to ease prior authorization
      COVID-19 still a big uncertainty for insurers in 2021
      Health insurers' outlook boosted after Dems' Georgia win
      humana_i.jpg
      Humana supports Ohio not-for-profits with $500,000
    • CMS will raise Medicare Advantage plan payments by 4.08% in 2022
      CMS approves rule forcing insurers to ease prior authorization
      Verma: CMS tried to 'infuse' free-market competition across healthcare during Trump era
    • Intermountain, Trinity, Memorial Hermann behind $300M private equity fund
      Operation Warp Speed to bump up McKesson's stock price
      Reporter's notebook: J.P. Morgan's 2021 health conference
      Hospitals, nursing homes get more time to file cost reports
    • 5 things to know about Google's $2.1B Fitbit acquisition
      Providence bets on machine-learning, consolidating data centers
      Mental health treatment was most common telehealth service during COVID
      Broad, Verily take Terra bioinformatics platform to Microsoft Azure cloud
    • Chance of COVID-19 triage care looms over Arizona hospitals
      U.S. ramps up vaccinations to get doses to more Americans
      367146427.jpg
      Should businesses mandate that staff get the COVID vaccine?
      A provider wearing a mask putting on surgical gloves.
      And the Shkreli Awards go to …
    • Cone Health CEO, CFO to depart amid pending Sentara merger
      Tower Health's finance chief resigning after years of steep losses
      AHRQ director Gopal Khanna resigns in response to Capitol riot
      Brigham president stepping down after Moderna controversy
    • Midwest
    • Northeast
    • South
    • West
  • Insights
    • ACA 10 Years After
    • Best Practices
    • InDepth Special Reports
    • Innovations
    • The Affordable Care Act after 10 years
    • New care model helps primary-care practices treat obesity
      doctor with patient
      COVID-19 treatment protocol developed in the field helps patients recover
      Rachel Wyatt
      Project to curb pressure injuries in hospitals shows promise
      Yale New Haven's COVID-19 nurse-staffing model has long-term benefits
    • Dr. James Hildreth
      How medical education can help fight racism
      Modern Healthcare InDepth: Breaking the bias that impedes better healthcare
      Videos: Healthcare industry executives describe their encounters with racism
      Michellene Davis
      Healthcare leadership lacks the racial diversity needed to reduce health disparities
      Hospital divided into multiple pieces
      Health systems may be warming to offshoring, a mainstay practice for insurers
    • A woman with a wearable sensor talking to her provider.
      Wearable sensors help diagnose heart rhythm problems in West Virginia
      self service station
      COVID-19 pushes patient expectations toward self-service
      Targeting high-risk cancer patients with genetics
      A nurse holds up a phone with a message to a family member saying surgery has started.
      Texting, tablets help hospitals keep family updated on patient care
  • Transformation
    • Patients
    • Operations
    • Care Delivery
    • Payment
    • Highmark Health inks six-year cloud, tech deal with Google
      Study: 1 in 5 patients report discrimination when getting healthcare
      HHS proposes changing HIPAA privacy rules
      Android health records app launches at 230 health systems
    • California hospitals prepare ethical protocol to prioritize lifesaving care
      Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway disband Haven
      Digital pathways poised to reshape healthcare continuum in 2021
      Healthcare was the hardest hit by supply shortages across all U.S. industries
    • A woman with a wearable sensor talking to her provider.
      Wearable sensors help diagnose heart rhythm problems in West Virginia
      New care model helps primary-care practices treat obesity
      How hospitals are building on COVID-19 telehealth momentum
      Researchers: Hospital price variation exacerbates health inequities
    • MedPAC votes to boost hospital payments, freeze or cut other providers
      Most Next Gen ACOs achieved bonuses in 2019
      Congress recalibrates Medicare Physician Fee Schedule after lobbying
      CMS approves rule to encourage value-based drug pricing
  • Data/Lists
    • Rankings/Lists
    • Interactive Databases
    • Data Points
    • Health Systems Financials
      Executive Compensation
      Physician Compensation
  • Op-Ed
    • Bold Moves
    • Breaking Bias
    • Commentaries
    • Letters
    • Vital Signs Blog
    • From the Editor
    • Wellstar CEO calls adapting for the pandemic her bold move
      Howard P. Kern
      Recognizing the value of telehealth in its infancy
      Dr. Stephen Markovich
      A bold move helped take him from family doctor to OhioHealth CEO
      Dr. Bruce Siegel
      Why taking a hospital not-for-profit was Dr. Bruce Siegel’s boldest move
    • Barry Ostrowsky
      Ending racism is a journey taken together; the starting point must be now
      Laura Lee Hall and Gary Puckrein
      Increased flu vaccination has never been more important for communities of color
      John Daniels Jr.
      Health equity: Making the journey from buzzword to reality
      Mark C. Clement and David Cook
      We all need to 'do something' to fight inequities and get healthcare right, for every patient, every time
    • Healing healthcare: some ideas for triage by the new Congress, administration
      Dr. Sachin H. Jain
      Medicare for All? The better route to universal coverage would be Medicare Advantage for All
      Connectivity: a social determinant of health that can exacerbate all the others
      Taking my shot at building trust
    • Letters: Eliminating bias in healthcare needs to be ‘deliberate and organic’
      Letters: Maybe dropping out of ACOs is a good thing for patients
      Letters: White House and Congress share blame for lack of national COVID strategy
      Letters: VA making strides to improve state veterans home inspections
    • Sponsored Content Provided By Optum
      How blockchain could ease frustration with the payment process
      Sponsored Content Provided By Optum
      Three steps to better data-sharing for payer and provider CIOs
      Sponsored Content Provided By Optum
      Reduce total cost of care: 6 reasons why providers and payers should tackle the challenge together
      Sponsored Content Provided By Optum
      Why CIOs went from back-office operators to mission-critical innovators
  • Awards
    • Award Programs
    • Nominate
    • Previous Award Programs
    • Other Award Programs
    • Best Places to Work in Healthcare Logo for Navigation
      Nominations Open - Best Places to Work in Healthcare
      Nominations Open - Health Care Hall of Fame
      Nominations Open - 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives
    • 100 Most Influential People
    • 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives
    • Best Places to Work in Healthcare
    • Health Care Hall of Fame
    • Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards
    • Top 25 Emerging Leaders
    • Top 25 Innovators
    • Top 25 Minority Leaders
    • Top 25 Women Leaders
    • Excellence in Nursing Awards
    • Design Awards
    • Top 25 COOs in Healthcare
    • 100 Top Hospitals
    • ACHE Awards
  • Events
    • Conferences
    • Galas
    • Webinars
    • COVID-19 Event Tracker
    • Leadership Symposium
    • Healthcare Transformation Summit
    • Women Leaders in Healthcare Conference
    • Workplace of the Future Conference
    • Strategic Marketing Conference
    • Social Determinants of Health Symposium
    • Best Places to Work Awards Gala
    • Health Care Hall of Fame Gala
    • Top 25 Minority Leaders Gala (2022)
    • Top 25 Women Leaders Gala
  • Listen
    • Podcast - Next Up
    • Podcast - Beyond the Byline
    • Sponsored Podcast - Healthcare Insider
    • Video Series - The Check Up
    • Sponsored Video Series - One on One
    • Carter Dredge
      Next Up Podcast: Ready, set, innovate! Innovation and disruption in healthcare
      Next Up Podcast: COVID-19, social determinants highlight health inequities — what next?
      Next Up Podcast: Saving Rural Health
      Ceci Connolly
      Next Up Podcast: How to navigate the murky post-election waters
    • An older man wearing a mask receiving a vaccine.
      Beyond the Byline: Verifying information on the chaotic COVID-19 vaccine rollout
      doctor burnout
      Beyond the Byline: How healthcare supply chain struggles contribute to employee burnout
      Beyond the Byline: Covering race and diversity in the healthcare industry
      Beyond the Byline: How telehealth utilization has impacted investor-owned company earnings
    • Leading intention promote diversity and inclusion
      Introducing Healthcare Insider Podcast
    • The Check Up: Trenda Ray
      The Check Up: Trenda Ray of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
      The Check Up: Dr. Kenneth Davis
      The Check Up: Dr. Kenneth Davis of Mount Sinai Health System
      The Check Up: Dr. Thomas McGinn
      The Check Up: Dr. Thomas McGinn of CommonSpirit Health
      The Check Up: Mark Ganz
      The Check Up: Mark Ganz of Cambia Health Solutions
    • Video: Ivana Naeymi Rad of Intelligent Medical Objects
  • MORE +
    • Advertise
    • Media Kit
    • Newsletters
    • Jobs
    • People on the Move
    • Reprints & Licensing
MENU
Breadcrumb
  1. Home
  2. Technology
April 07, 2018 01:00 AM

How third parties harvest health data from providers, payers and pharmacies

Rachel Z. Arndt
  • Tweet
  • Share
  • Share
  • Email
  • More
    Print
    Getty Images/Ikon Images

    As the healthcare industry continues to struggle with interoperability, there's one realm in which patient data move remarkably freely: the secondary market.

    Indeed, hackers aren't the only ones making money off of patient health data. Legitimate companies are cashing in too, including health systems, pharmacies and occasionally electronic health record vendors—and the third parties purchasing the data.

    These third parties get de-identified health information from a vast array of sources and then sell the information on a secondary market to buyers interested in gleaning strategy insights. Buyers might be pharmaceutical firms intent on refining their marketing strategies, figuring out where to invest next, or how to target clinical trials. A large pharmaceutical company might pay between $10 million and $40 million per year for data, consulting and services from Iqvia (formerly IMS Health), one of the dominant players in the market, according to Adam Tanner in the book Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records.

    As long as the data are de-identified, sharing them is fine under the HIPAA privacy and security rules.

    "Even small pools of data about patients that have the exact disease a company is trying to sell into are very valuable," said John Gardner, a partner with NGP Capital.

    Big money on the secondary market

    IQVIA:

    • FORMERLY: The company is the result of a 2016 merger between IMS Health Holdings and Quintiles Transnational Holdings
    • DATA PORTFOLIO: More than 530 million de-identified patient records from more than 100 markets
    • 2017 REVENUE: $8 billion
    • DATA COME FROM: Providers, payers, pharmacies
    • DATA GO TO: Biotech, medical-device and pharmaceutical companies; medical researchers; government agencies; payers and others
    Source: Modern Healthcare research

    The data come from such third parties as Iqvia, which had $8 billion in revenue in 2017 and has agreements with more than 120,000 sources around the world to get anonymous patient data. It collects the data from providers, payers, and pharmacies, according to Kim Gray, Iqvia's chief privacy officer. Rarely, she said, do they get data from EHR vendors.

    Gray would not say definitively whether Iqvia pays hospital systems for patient data. "There are a wide variety of arrangements that exist among our data sources that compensate them," she said.

    Even when data appear to come from a hospital, they are technically arriving via a technology partner. Vendor contracts with health systems sometimes include clauses that authorize the vendor to facilitate the data transfer, said Nilesh Chandra, senior leader in PA Consulting's healthcare business.

    While health systems themselves own their patient data, EHR vendors still have a great deal of control over it, both legally and technologically. It can be tough, however, to nail down which vendors are actually selling patient data to third parties.

    "It's the EHR vendor who's aggregating provider data, then de-identifying them, and then, at their discretion, monetizing or commercializing them," said Scott Kolesar, Ernst & Young's U.S. health tech innovation leader. "The owners of the information in terms of being in a position to take it into the secondary market are the EHR vendors themselves. In many of their contracts, they seek the use of de-identified data to do research or to provide broad-based analytics to a larger community."

    For instance, Practice Fusion's provider user agreement includes provisions that allow it to sell de-identified information "for any purpose without restriction." The company has charged $50,000 to $2 million for longitudinal data sets, according to Tanner.

    Not all vendors conduct such practices or include such clauses. Epic Systems Corp., for one, doesn't, according to a company spokesperson.

    But just because a company isn't selling patient data now doesn't mean it won't in the future. "They're thinking about doing it as a way of extending their business model and to take advantage of the value in the data," Kolesar said. That's a strategic decision, he added, because these vendors understand that their enterprise applications are becoming less and less necessary as smaller apps gain ground.

    As more players get into the data-sharing game, more patients' data are at risk of breaches that affect security and privacy alike. "Just because something is anonymized, it is still possible to identify who that is when you merge that record with other records that are available," said Sam Hanna, director of George Washington University's online master's degree in health informatics program.

    Hanna compared what's possible with patient data to what happened with Cambridge Analytica, the firm that combined data from personality tests and Facebook profiles with voter records and other information. "That could happen in the healthcare field," he said. "Detailed consent is key for the patient to understand that their data could be used for something like this."

    Healthcare organizations should also be looking at how to make the data even harder to re-identify, said Eric Gascho, vice president of government affairs and policy for the National Health Council. "It's of utmost concern," he said

    Even when the data are used for good—for research and precision medicine, for example—there are still risks.

    "Harnessing that data for research purposes and targeted therapies is all great unless it falls into the wrong hands," Hanna said. It's crucial, therefore, that the organizations holding the data protect it, he said. "It's a balance between data privacy and data utility."

    Letter
    to the
    Editor

    Send us a letter

    Have an opinion about this story? Click here to submit a Letter to the Editor, and we may publish it in print.

    Recommended for You
    5 things to know about Google's $2.1B Fitbit acquisition
    5 things to know about Google's $2.1B Fitbit acquisition
    Providence bets on machine-learning, consolidating data centers
    Providence bets on machine-learning, consolidating data centers
    Sponsored Content
    Get Free Newsletters

    Sign up for free enewsletters and alerts to receive breaking news and in-depth coverage of healthcare events and trends, as they happen, right to your inbox.

    Subscribe Today

    The weekly magazine, websites, research and databases provide a powerful and all-encompassing industry presence. We help you make informed business decisions and lead your organizations to success.

    Subscribe
    Connect with Us
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • RSS
    • Instagram

    Stay Connected

    Join the conversation with Modern Healthcare through our social media pages

    MDHC_Logotype_white
    Contact Us

    (877) 812-1581

    Email us

     

    Resources
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise with Us
    • Ad Choices Ad Choices
    • Sitemap
    Editorial Dept
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Code of Ethics
    • Awards
    • About Us
    Legal
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Privacy Request
    Modern Healthcare
    Copyright © 1996-2021. Crain Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
    • News
      • This Week's News
      • COVID-19
      • Providers
      • Insurance
      • Government
      • Finance
      • Technology
      • Safety & Quality
      • People
      • Regional News
        • Midwest
        • Northeast
        • South
        • West
      • Digital Edition
    • Insights
      • ACA 10 Years After
      • Best Practices
      • InDepth Special Reports
      • Innovations
    • Transformation
      • Patients
      • Operations
      • Care Delivery
      • Payment
    • Data/Lists
      • Rankings/Lists
      • Interactive Databases
      • Data Points
    • Op-Ed
      • Bold Moves
      • Breaking Bias
      • Commentaries
      • Letters
      • Vital Signs Blog
      • From the Editor
    • Awards
      • Award Programs
        • 100 Most Influential People
        • 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives
        • Best Places to Work in Healthcare
        • Health Care Hall of Fame
        • Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards
        • Top 25 Emerging Leaders
        • Top 25 Innovators
        • Top 25 Minority Leaders
        • Top 25 Women Leaders
      • Nominate
      • Previous Award Programs
        • Excellence in Nursing Awards
        • Design Awards
        • Top 25 COOs in Healthcare
      • Other Award Programs
        • 100 Top Hospitals
        • ACHE Awards
    • Events
      • Conferences
        • Leadership Symposium
        • Healthcare Transformation Summit
        • Women Leaders in Healthcare Conference
        • Workplace of the Future Conference
        • Strategic Marketing Conference
        • Social Determinants of Health Symposium
      • Galas
        • Best Places to Work Awards Gala
        • Health Care Hall of Fame Gala
        • Top 25 Minority Leaders Gala (2022)
        • Top 25 Women Leaders Gala
      • Webinars
      • COVID-19 Event Tracker
    • Listen
      • Podcast - Next Up
      • Podcast - Beyond the Byline
      • Sponsored Podcast - Healthcare Insider
      • Video Series - The Check Up
      • Sponsored Video Series - One on One
    • MORE +
      • Advertise
      • Media Kit
      • Newsletters
      • Jobs
      • People on the Move
      • Reprints & Licensing