Dive Brief:
- Optum Labs, UnitedHealth Group's big data venture, is quickly becoming home to perhaps the largest database of de-identified patient data available in healthcare today.
- Optum is a research center co-founded by Optum and the Mayo Clinic. Recent new partners have included the Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy, the Medica Research Institute Merck and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, but there are many more.
- Research projects Optum is pursuing include investigations of disease care pathways, hospital admission for diabetes complications and use of proton beam therapy for cancer.
Dive Insight:
Clearly, working with such a large patient database offers tremendous potential for developing new insights into difficult problems in healthcare delivery. With such a large batch of data in hand, Optum can generate unique insights "through prototyping and testing in Optum and partners' care settings," according to Optum's CEO, Paul Bleicher, MD. This is a plus for the industry.
However, it's well known in the IT business that de-identified data can eventually be identified when matched up with other data that fits, lock-in-key, with the data already in hand. Identified data on the scale of Optum's database would theoretically be worth billions of dollars to marketers in the pharmaceutical industry. And when you consider that Optum has already partnered with Pfizer and a Merck subsidiary, it does raise questions as to how strict the big data company's privacy protections are.