Dive Brief:
- While most states share de-identified hospital discharge data, that data is vulnerable to being re-identified, according to the Federal Trade Commission, a report from Health Data Management states.
- Data states collect includes diagnostic information, expected source of payment, patient demographic data, treatment data and total charges.
- According to the FTC, the de-identified data can be combined with other publicly-available data to identify individuals.
Dive Insight:
In theory, sharing this data for academic purposes serves a useful purpose. But the FTC warns that private companies, not researchers, are the top users of state health data. And they can have great success in matching people to data. For example, in Washington, researchers were able to correctly match 43% of news articles about accidents containing words such as "hospitalized" with the states discharge data to identify individuals, according to Health Data Management.