Cerner has struck a deal in which it will let a life insurance industry data vendor access patient records. Under the terms of the deal, risk management and digital services vendor MIB will be able to offer life insurance industry players access to 54 million patient medical records, as well as 5,400 patient portals.
The deal makes Cerner the third EHR vendor MIB has signed up for its services, which also include data from Epic as well as other EHR and HIE partners. MIB’s clients use the data as part of the process of underwriting life insurance policies. According to MIB, the life insurance industry currently lacks a single solution that offers easy access to medical information across multiple health systems and data providers.
If you wonder how Cerner can get away with sharing this data, it’s important to note that the partners only intend to offer access to data if patients have given consent for such sharing.
However, this raises the question of how MIB and/or Cerner will scale up obtaining such consents, given that they can’t be obtained en masse. This problem dates all the way back to the early days of HIEs, when the industry first began to grapple with the reality that managing consent for patient data sharing was going to be a huge thing.
Given the differences between sharing anonymized patient data for research and selling identified data for underwriting life insurance policies, I see a lot of room for confusion here. Patients may end up permitting such sharing without really grasping the implications of their decision.
To make this work, not only will they need to have permission from patients but, I’d argue, go for something like an informed consent which spells out what happens when the life insurance industry gets ahold of your data. Patients should understand that when a life insurer gathers information it’s using that information to exclude people from access to its products and services, which is quite unlike what providers do with such information.
What it all comes down to is that efforts to share patient data are going to become more and more massive over the next few years. Agreements like the one struck earlier this year, in which 14 US health systems come together to share anonymized information embracing nearly 13% of all US hospitals, are likely to become a common occurrence.
However, if providers want to do a high volume of data deals, they’ll have to make sure people understand the difference between fully identified information MIB seems to be collecting and anonymized big data sets. If patients get burned by giving away identified health data, it could get a lot of bad publicity and sour many patients in the idea of sharing any data whatsoever.
