HealthIT – The Health Care Blog

Hoarding Patient Data is a Lousy Business Strategy: 7 Reasons Why

Oct 17, 2018• 18

By VINCE KURAITIS & LESLIE KELLY HALL

Among many healthcare providers, it’s been long-standing conventional wisdom (CW) that hoarding patient data is an effective business strategy to lock-in patients — “He who holds the data, wins”. However…we’ve never seen any evidence that this actually works…have you?

We’re here to challenge CW. In this article we’ll explore the rationale of “hoarding as business strategy”, review evidence suggesting it’s still prevalent, and suggest 7 reasons why we believe it’s a lousy business strategy:

Data Hoarding Doesn’t Work — It Doesn’t Lock-In Patients or Build Affinity
Convenience is King in Patient Selection of Providers
Loyalty is Declining, Shopping is Increasing
Providers Have a Decreasingly Small “Share” of Patient Data
Providers Don’t Want to Become a Lightning Rod in the “Techlash” Backlash
Hoarding Works Against Public Policy and the Law
Providers, Don’t Fly Blind with Value-Based Care

Background

In the video below, Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale University School of Medicine capsulizes the rationale of hoarding as business strategy.

We encourage you to take a minute to listen to Dr. Krumholz, but if you’re in a hurry we’ve abstracted the most relevant portions of his comments:

“The leader of a very major healthcare system said this to me confidentially on the phone… ‘why would we want to make it easy for people to get their health data…we want to keep the patients with us so why wouldn’t we want to make it just a little more difficult for them to leave.’ …I couldn’t believe it a physician health care provider professional explaining to me the philosophy of that health system.”

Ensuring that the 21st Century Cures Act Health IT Provisions Promotes Interoperability and Data Exchange

Oct 16, 2018• 4

By KENNETH D. MANDL, MD; DAN GOTTLIEB MPA;
JOSH C. MANDEL, MD

The opportunity has never been greater to, at long last, develop a flourishing health information economy based on apps which have full access to health system data–for both patients and populations–and liquid data that travels to where it is needed for care, management and population and public health. A provision in the 21st Century Cures Act could transform how patients and providers use health information technology. The 2016 law requires that certified health information technology products have an application programming interface (API) that allows health information to be accessed, exchanged, and used “without special effort” and that provides “access to all data elements of a patient’s electronic health record to the extent permissible under applicable privacy laws.”

After nearly two years of regulatory work, an important rule on this issue is now pending at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), typically a late stop before a proposed rule is issued for public comment. It is our hope that this rule will contain provisions to create capabilities for patients to obtain complete copies of their EHR data and for providers and patients to easily integrate apps (web, iOS and Android) with EHRs and other clinical systems.

Modern software systems use APIs to interact with each other and exchange data. APIs are fundamental to software made familiar to all consumers by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. APIs could also offer turnkey access to population health data in a standard format, and interoperable approaches to exchange and aggregate data across sites of care.

WTF Health | Scaling Up NLP with Simon Beaulah of Linguamatics

May 25, 2018

By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health.

What can you find diving into the black hole of healthcare’s unstructured data? Natural Language Processing (NLP) seems to be the ‘tech du jour’ this year, so I spoke to early-entrant Simon Beaulah of Linguamatics about the big picture of NLP-plus-AI and the tech’s evolving role in improving care by putting together a more complete ‘patient narrative’ in the EMR.

Wanna hear his thoughts on what’s next for NLP in terms of scaling? Jump in at 2:15 mark.