medical data mining
Medical Data Mining
For practically all of my adult life I have been a member of a medical aid scheme. In the beginning our relationship was simple: each month I would send them a cheque to cover my membership. As and when I incurred medical expenses, I would submit my receipts and they, in return, would send a cheque of reimbursement. No doubt they kept a record of each member’s claims so that each year end they could adjust their fees accordingly – just standard cost accounting really.
As time went by our relationship became more sophisticated. My membership fee was deducted from my salary by my employer and my monthly tax payment adjusted automatically. My claims were submitted by E-mail and the refunds were paid directly into my bank account. So far so modern.
Somewhere along the line - and not really noticed by us members - hospitals, doctors and pharmacies started being required to record a standard code against each item on their invoices as well as provide details of all medication in a standard format. All this information was fed into a vast databank.
But it didn’t stop there. The scheme entered into an agreement with the major supermarket chains so that members participating in a so-called healthy food program would have the full details of all their supermarket purchases siphoned back into the databank. Members who opted into this scheme were rewarded with a monthly healthy food dividend paid directly into their bank accounts. So now the scheme not only knew about my medical ailments and medication, but also how many bunches of bananas or tubs of yoghurt, as well as the brand, I bought. They also knew about all my other supermarket purchases from toilet paper and household cleaners to stationery, crockery and lawn fertiliser. If they were really clever they could even have noted my supermarket absences as signs of travelling outside the country.
The healthy food program then became just one part of a healthy living program where members were encouraged to exercise and undergo regular health checks. Subsidised gym membership was offered – and monitored. Participating members were rewarded with discounted airfares and other nice perks. Once personal health monitors were added to smart phones and wearables, you could achieve even further rewards by feeding back your daily exercise regime. So each time my adult children go running, it knows where they ran, how fast they ran and, depending on the sophistication of the device, their heart rate, blood pressure and a whole of other things we never even knew ourselves in the old days of just taking the dog for a stroll.
My guess is that the next item in their healthy lifestyle plan is going to be an offer to decipher my DNA for a few bucks, something most people will be unable to resist. We all want to know if we are descended from Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great or even Helen of Troy.
Now, the big question is, what is the medical aid scheme doing with all this data they have purchased for a song? So far, they don’t seem to have passed it onto greedy marketers keen to flog me all manner of things in a targeted way. Or maybe they have and the marketers have just got cleverer at covering their tracks. I also hope and pray they haven’t willy nilly passed my data onto the pharmaceutical companies in exchange for a fat fee.
In the medical academic world, researchers come up with a hypothesis, design a research program and then go out and collect and analyse data. It’s a process that could take months or even years. However for the medical aid scheme to conduct similar research all they need is a clever algorithm writer who can code a program to mine their ever growing databank of millions upon millions of records and come up with an answer in days – or possibly just in minutes if they’re really smart.
It won’t be long for a super algorithm writer decides to throw hypotheses out of the window and writes a supermining program that will sift out all key relationships. Some, like older people are more likely to have Alzheimers disease than young people, with be obvious. But they might find that people who buy brand A of soap and have a certain strand of DNA are less likely to incur skin cancer or that purchasers of brand B of household cleaner are more likely to be asthma sufferers or that people in small villages who eat raisins live longer – the sky is the limit on what they could deduce – and all at the click of a mouse!
And even that’s not the end. There’s all that juicy data stored publicly on the Internet just waiting to be trawled. Then there are all the private databases held by everyone from Facebook to the credit card companies and from cell phone operators to private security companies and stock exchanges. Those clever algorithm writers must be smacking their lips at the challenge of merging and mining it all.
My medical aid scheme is just one example of a company to whom I have unwittingly donated my personal information without fully thinking through the implications. How many more are out there watching my every move. As my near namesake Brian Patten writes in the final line of his lovely poem Little Johnny’s Confessions, “the sniffer dogs will hunt me down – they have my lollipops!”
For practically all of my adult life I have been a member of a medical aid scheme. In the beginning our relationship was simple: each month I would send them a cheque to cover my membership. As and when I incurred medical expenses, I would submit my receipts and they, in return, would send a cheque of reimbursement. No doubt they kept a record of each member’s claims so that each year end they could adjust their fees accordingly – just standard cost accounting really.
As time went by our relationship became more sophisticated. My membership fee was deducted from my salary by my employer and my monthly tax payment adjusted automatically. My claims were submitted by E-mail and the refunds were paid directly into my bank account. So far so modern.
Somewhere along the line - and not really noticed by us members - hospitals, doctors and pharmacies started being required to record a standard code against each item on their invoices as well as provide details of all medication in a standard format. All this information was fed into a vast databank.
But it didn’t stop there. The scheme entered into an agreement with the major supermarket chains so that members participating in a so-called healthy food program would have the full details of all their supermarket purchases siphoned back into the databank. Members who opted into this scheme were rewarded with a monthly healthy food dividend paid directly into their bank accounts. So now the scheme not only knew about my medical ailments and medication, but also how many bunches of bananas or tubs of yoghurt, as well as the brand, I bought. They also knew about all my other supermarket purchases from toilet paper and household cleaners to stationery, crockery and lawn fertiliser. If they were really clever they could even have noted my supermarket absences as signs of travelling outside the country.
The healthy food program then became just one part of a healthy living program where members were encouraged to exercise and undergo regular health checks. Subsidised gym membership was offered – and monitored. Participating members were rewarded with discounted airfares and other nice perks. Once personal health monitors were added to smart phones and wearables, you could achieve even further rewards by feeding back your daily exercise regime. So each time my adult children go running, it knows where they ran, how fast they ran and, depending on the sophistication of the device, their heart rate, blood pressure and a whole of other things we never even knew ourselves in the old days of just taking the dog for a stroll.
My guess is that the next item in their healthy lifestyle plan is going to be an offer to decipher my DNA for a few bucks, something most people will be unable to resist. We all want to know if we are descended from Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great or even Helen of Troy.
Now, the big question is, what is the medical aid scheme doing with all this data they have purchased for a song? So far, they don’t seem to have passed it onto greedy marketers keen to flog me all manner of things in a targeted way. Or maybe they have and the marketers have just got cleverer at covering their tracks. I also hope and pray they haven’t willy nilly passed my data onto the pharmaceutical companies in exchange for a fat fee.
In the medical academic world, researchers come up with a hypothesis, design a research program and then go out and collect and analyse data. It’s a process that could take months or even years. However for the medical aid scheme to conduct similar research all they need is a clever algorithm writer who can code a program to mine their ever growing databank of millions upon millions of records and come up with an answer in days – or possibly just in minutes if they’re really smart.
It won’t be long for a super algorithm writer decides to throw hypotheses out of the window and writes a supermining program that will sift out all key relationships. Some, like older people are more likely to have Alzheimers disease than young people, with be obvious. But they might find that people who buy brand A of soap and have a certain strand of DNA are less likely to incur skin cancer or that purchasers of brand B of household cleaner are more likely to be asthma sufferers or that people in small villages who eat raisins live longer – the sky is the limit on what they could deduce – and all at the click of a mouse!
And even that’s not the end. There’s all that juicy data stored publicly on the Internet just waiting to be trawled. Then there are all the private databases held by everyone from Facebook to the credit card companies and from cell phone operators to private security companies and stock exchanges. Those clever algorithm writers must be smacking their lips at the challenge of merging and mining it all.
My medical aid scheme is just one example of a company to whom I have unwittingly donated my personal information without fully thinking through the implications. How many more are out there watching my every move. As my near namesake Brian Patten writes in the final line of his lovely poem Little Johnny’s Confessions, “the sniffer dogs will hunt me down – they have my lollipops!”
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