A “simple” medical procedure (say,a heart operation) can cost an insurance company $35,000. So if they hire a person full-time to do the data mining, he only has to catch one or two cases per year to justify his salary. If he catches one case per month, then the company will be glad to pay the “staggering” manpower costs.
If it ever becomes possible to link the databases in the pizza company, the health club, the athletic shoe store, and the blood-test clinic, then the insurance companies will do it.
There are still a lot of barriers in place, both technical and bureaucratic. But it will happen within 50 years.
You are missing a lot of barriers however. Most people are on medical GROUP plans through either their employer or through the government. In those cases, it is useless to worry about individuals because they can’t do anything about it anyway. They work with populations and they already have population data. That is what actuaries do.
Secondly, people keep ignoring the US HIPPA laws when it comes to sharing health information between parties at all. I work with that stuff and it is Draconian in a good way. Parties absolutely cannot share that type of information with each other except under the most stringent controls and there are few ways around that. The main way around it is to strip off information identifying individuals from all files and the procedures for doing that are tightly proscribed. That makes it impossible to do what is feared here. These regulations were put in place in the 1990’s and there is no reason to think additional protections on all sensitive data won’t be put in place in the future.
And I can’t wait. Because when it does, I’ll open up a chain of cash-only, no-tell pizzerias and rake in the money!
Honestly, this is one area where the free market really will solve its own problems. (The ones government regulations, such as HIPPA, the health information privacy laws Shagnasty mentioned, haven’t already solved.)
The manpower costs to produce individually targetted results are trivial and are in use today due to computers and software. The people can have similar rules/templates of processing applied against their individual purchasing habits.
Here is an example:
For all customers that spent more than X dollars and produced at least Y gross profit in the last 3 months, send a coupon for 1 free item of their most often purchased item whose cost is less than Z.
The trick is not the technical ability to create these scenarios and crunch through the data, the trick is to determine what is really going to be effective in producing more profits.
Just a clairfication, Visa and MC do not store cardholder data (and by that I mean, name, address, social, etc) in any fashion. Your bank does, but not the card industry.
:smack: Did you not click on the link in the OP…or READ the OP? Its a speculation thread. If you clicked on the link you would see that there IS confidential patient data in there (its talking about the guys health problems, what he can and can’t eat (without a sur charge), etc etc). IF that kind of data was accessible to a pizza place then they WOULD be bound by HIPAA…at least today. Of course, if that kind of data is that wide spread in 2010 then HIPAA would probably be out the window…or there would be some other regulations governing access to sensitive data (or maybe some new definition of what is or is not ‘sensitive’).
Some of you have some serious paranoia issues or (hopefully) you are just plain ignorant about how this stuff actually works.
I hope it is clear at this point that nobody is legally getting any health information in the U.S. unless it is on a “need to know” basis. There are some small exceptions for drug marketing but, in general, even another doctor cannot access your information without having a need to know. We can rule that big fear right our.
We are left with:
Computers
Lots of data
?
?
?
Spying on individuals all over
That is just not the way this stuff plays out. This type of thing is my profession and, in my experience, people are amazed at the money and manpower that go into moderately sized databases and analysis. The computers just don’t sit there unaided. There are teams of project managers, hardware personnel, programmers, business analysts, and systems analysts to keep them running. It takes thousands upon thousands of man-hours a year not to mention millions of dollars to keep even a medium sized database running let alone have it produce meaningful results. The databases described here would be more likely in the billions of dollars a year.
The weakness isn’t in with computers, it is with the people. Databases can accurately store anything you throw at them. However, that data has to be stored in a meaningful way and that is a huge challenge. There are countless people with advanced degrees that do nothing but work on those questions. That is just the back-end. On the front-end, you need business people that have a purpose in mind and the statisticians and computer experts to get it done. It isn’t an easy task.
Unless a database is designed for a specific set of tasks, you will most likely just produce a whole lot of semi-useless garbage that nobody knows what to do with. That was highlighted with my real-world example of retail loyalty cards. A decade ago, grand visions of data mining were all over. Today, they are mainly an advertising tool and an easy way to make sale pricing easier at the point of sale. That whole thing devolved pretty quickly.
Let’s say that a pizza chain did partner up with a insurance company. What are the problems with this?
Why is an insurance company partnering up with a pizza place in the first place. It creates a whole lot of work for both of them and is incredibly expensive.
What meaningful data can they collect from that? Maybe someone buys 5 pizzas a week and that sounds bad from a health perspective. What if the data didn’t tell you that the person that is buying them is a secretary that has to buy one for the office every day. There is no way to know based on any conceivable dataset what people are actually doing with what they buy.
what is going to happen when consumers find out that the companies they buy from are sharing potentially sensitive information? Why would companies want to take that chance on something that has dubious benefits for themselves anyway.
Some of you are focusing on what could happen if you ended up with a disk with one person’s data that you were interested in compiled from banks, insurance companies, retail stores, and others. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. Those computer systems don’t talk to a common source and there is no conceivable way that anyone would spend the time and money to make them do that.
Exactly, and new legislation can work the other way, as well. HIPPA is arguably a good thing in terms of patient’s rights - but it’s just words on paper. It could be repealed, ammended and turned topsy turvy. Privacy is only what we make it - as pointed out in another thread recently, it would have been unthinkable 300 years ago for a person to want to be alone while defecating.
I’m looking at it from the other way 'round - not what if the pizza company knows your health history, but what if the health industry can get your pizza order history? Unprotected information from an unprotected source.
'Sides, even if the specifics of the guy’s health history couldn’t be revealed, it would be in line with HIPPA for a pop-up to appear saying something non-specific like “Due to Personal Health Accountability Act 2546.23249.678c, a $20 surcharge will be applied to the bill.” and all such surcharges remitted to the health insurance company at the end of the billing cycle.
I dunno. The Department of Homeland Security probably has a way to tap most databases if they want to do it. The Patriot Act probably allows it–not that the current administration feels particularly constrained by legal formality anyway. If mere suspicion of involvement in terrorism is enough to qualify for a no fly list (and possibly a free trip to a foreign country for non-consensual BDSM activity), it’s probably enough to do some datamining. I don’t want some techno geek peering at a screen, seeing that I bought a case of beer and some ammo, then seeing another screen that says I’ve dared to criticise the President, and then concluding I’m a “Threat to National Security” (just like the uber-villian Cat Stevens). Farfetched? Maybe. However, the events of the last 5 years make it worthy of consideration.
Steve MB, you’re not automating the process, as Shagnasty points out above. You’re getting, at best, a couple of data inputs on random individuals that may bear, in some unspecified fashion, on blood pressure and cholesterol.
Its H.I.P.A.A btw, not H.I.P.P.A (which stands for gods know what)…basically an acroynm for HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT. Just getting that straight.
Its not just words on paper…its legislation and there are legal consequences today for violating it (though from my perspective as an IT integrator its pretty damn vague and difficult to know when an office is or is not in compliance wrt their network). Certainly there COULD be new legislation that opens things up in the future…but I don’t see any movement in that direction to be honest. In fact, things seem to be going more and more towards stiffer regulation. Unless that trend changes, I don’t see ordering pizza in 2010 as having that level of data detail…outside of fiction.
I’m guessing you are onto the OP though now.
Companies do this when they rent names from other companies. Software that I have written for clients involved selectively choosing the names of consumers whose purchases fit the criteria of the company willing to pay for them.
Additionally, my brother works for a company whose sole purpose is the aggregation of data from multiple sources which in turn they sell access to that info to other companies.
Something else to worry about are the RFID chips being placed in apparel (already in stores). This is similar to the concern mentioned above regarding the toll road auto-reader.
Right but that isn’t really what the OP’s example is about. I know that dabases are good for some types of marketing. I also have no doubt that the NSA and others will use whatever they can get their grubby little hands on for their own use behind the scenes.
The stuff in the OP is different however. It predicts the use of databases containing all kinds of disparate data to be used by private companies and affecting people’s everyday activities in an intrusive and spooky way.
