Your Data For Sale?

By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist

Partners Healthcare, the giant of the Boston medical world, is studying a plan with other big academic hospitals elsewhere to sell aggregated patient data to the government, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, insurers, and publishers. "As the adage goes, 'Information is power, and power is money,' " notes a confidential Partners' document outlining the 'data commercialization project."

Partners executives say no decision has been made to go ahead with the project. "It is still in the brainstorming stages," says Partners chief operating officer, Tom Glynn. They are sensitive to concerns about patient confidentiality, and say the most likely first customer would be government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. As an example, they say data collected by the hospitals could have been used by the FDA to correlate the use of Vioxx and the incidence of heart attacks.

But the confidential outline makes clear Partners sees the market as much broader. "This project offers the opportunity to understand how various enterprises (government, pharma/biotech, consulting/analysis firms, investment analysts, publishers, etc.) utilize healthcare data to achieve their goals," the memo states.

Among the information available in Partners' 'data warehouse': patient demographic data; diagnoses and procedure data; inpatient pharmacy data; and ''assorted data" on inpatient hospitalization and clinical encounters, including provider information.

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