Data. And opportunity.
All of the well-intentioned, market-based arguments for solving America's health care conundrum aside, access to big data may be the key to driving success in this economy.
Especially if you are an institution that thrives on monetizing the knowledge that data provides and taking advantage of information asymmetries. Like, for instance, if you are one of the world's largest ecommerce, banking and insurance companies. Which - whaddya know?
- the three partners in the initiative just announced happen to be.
So, the fact that they have intelligent leaders, what appear to be genuinely public-spirited motives and the means to make a difference, is important, but should not blind anyone to the opportunity inherent in gaining health care data and the ability to recombine it with financial, commercial and attitudinal information to gain market dominance. JL
Abha Bhattarai reports in the Washington Post, Karl Russell and Nick Wingfield report in the New York Times:
What happens when a company that has access to our weekly
shopping lists, eating habits and in-home Alexa-based assistants also
becomes involved in our medical care? There are federal restrictions on using medical data for
marketing purposes or to make lending decisions by banks. But the law covers traditional
health insurance and health care; it doesn’t cover many other sources of health-related data. “Amazon is a data-centric company.”