Big Data Could Jeopardize Healthcare Privacy And Security

By Greg Bengel, contributing writer

Presenters at an MIT Technology Review event point out that there are significant privacy and security concerns with big data’s application in healthcare

According to a recent article on mobihealthnews.com, the use of big data in healthcare can jeopardize privacy and security. The article covers presentations at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech event in Cambridge, MA, in which presenters pointed out that we may need to be having some different, more sobering conversations about big data.

This is quite a different tone from the typical buzz surrounding big data. Health IT Outcomes recently reported on three ways big data is changing healthcare. Specifically, big data has been praised for its ability to identify patients at high-risk for certain medical conditions before problems occur, increase the quality of care received by patients, and reduce the rising costs of healthcare.

Also, a recent survey from the eHealth Initiative and the College of Health Information Management Executives (covered here by Health IT Outcomes), found that “Nearly 80 percent of respondents felt that leveraging big data and predictive analytics is important to their organization’s strategic plans and priorities.”

But while big data has great potential to alter the healthcare landscape, presenters at the EmTech event said that it must be approached with caution. According to one presenter, MIT Technology Review Editor in Chief Jason Pontin, “From healthcare, to different ways to make data more accessible, data is becoming highly personalized and new services are rolling into the market. But at the same time, new questions are raised as we consider what the implications might be for security as well as privacy.”

Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, spoke at the event about de-identified data and anonymity. Mobihealthnews.com explains that “as data analytics get better and better, anonymous data can even be re-identified after the fact.” According to Crawford, “We’re in a really interesting situation with health data. We have previously had HIPAA as the act that really tightly regulates how health data can move and be shared and that’s worked really well for doctors. But think about what happens when you get sick now. You probably type something into a search engine, put your symptoms in and see ‘what might be wrong with me?’ That data is completely unprotected by HIPAA.”

Perhaps most bizarre, Mitchell Higashi, chief economist at GE Healthcare points out, as mobihealthnews.com explains, “that when quantified self apps create a complex biometric picture of an individual, they also create the possibility of a “quantified clone” of that individual, which could then be accessed by others.”

In his talk, Higashi states, “In a world of unstructured big data, we go all the way to the extreme of highly structured data, where we’re essentially re-creating digital people. Once your unit of measurement is a person, you can now build into this person code. Specific health behaviors, risks for many diseases, and you can tag them to a virtual location on the map.”