Excerpt
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): A story published a few days ago caught our attention. It described how hospitals buy information about you to determine how likely you are to get sick and what it would cost to treat you. For more we’re joined by one of the co-authors, Shannon Pettypiece of Bloomberg News. So what are they buying and who are they buying it from?
SHANNON PETTYPIECE, Bloomberg News: Well they are buying the same type of data that retailers have been using for years to target products at you and what we’re talking about here is that information that’s collected by companies called data brokers, which can track every transaction a consumer can make, every purchase they make, with a drug store or a grocery store loyalty card.
They can find out how much your home is worth, what type of car you own. Even things like your interests, whether you like hiking or rock climbing based off of public databases or even your web browsing history. And for years, retailers have used this to send you a coupon or to figure out who might want to subscribe to their certain list or product.
Now hospitals are saying, can we use this data this information to try to predict who’s going to get sick and who is going to end up at the emergency room.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So why are hospitals interested in having this kind of information?
SHANNON PETTYPIECE: Well under Obamacare they have an increased incentive to keep patients healthy because the law changes the way they are paid.
So under the law, hospitals now get penalized if you come back to the emergency room too frequently and if a hospital isn’t meeting certain patient quality and health outcomes and insurers are following the same mold too.
Insurers no longer want to pay for hospitals who are just doing more and more test and procedures over and over again and they want to be paying for quality so hospitals are going to be held accountable if patients are too sick if patients are coming to the emergency room too frequently.
No comments:
Post a Comment