Amazon, and Other Big Data Companies Move to Sell Health Related Data   

It came to light this week that Amazon has been developing software that could mine a patient’s medical records to help doctors and hospitals to “help patients and cut costs”. Similar software are being developed by Apple, Google, probably everyone else. Healthcare data is already available in various forms electronically and what is not, can be scanned and converted to searchable databases with ease. There is enormous interest from owners of this big data to find ways to monetize the data. It should come as a surprise that tech companies have been working for a few years to find new ways to get into health-related business. And it should help the patients get better advice, driven by algorithms that could detect patterns and suggest solutions, mostly without much human interactions, hence the reduced cost. It should also scare the privacy watchdogs as this data is bound to be exploited in ways that we don’t know of at the time but will find out about newspaper articles like this time about Amazon.