Practice Fusion Invited Millions Of Patients To Write Reviews They May Not Realize Are Public. Some Are Explicit.

Medical records start-up Practice Fusion has attracted a whopping $134 million in venture capital thanks to its appealing business model: it offers 100,000 (and counting) medical types free, web-based patient  management services.  The doctors get for free something that’s usually quite expensive, while cashing in on $150 million (so far) in government incentives to adopt electronic health record technology. Practice Fusion gets an attractive platform of doctors that medical labs, hospitals and medical billers pay to access. “Our community drives $100 billion in spend,” says CEO Ryan Howard. The start-up also gets data on 75 million patients’ health conditions and prescriptions, which it de-identifies and then makes available to analysts, pharma companies, and market research types, who also pay. You can see why a VC firm like Kleiner Perkins put $70 million into the start-up this September, valuing it at $700 million. It’s like Facebook but with tons of valuable medical data.

But the start-up could have a big privacy problem thanks to a doctor review site it launched in April. ‘Patient Fusion’ debuted with 30,000 doctor profiles and a stunning two million reviews, all from verified patients of the doctors. The site came as a surprise to some doctors – who knew the start-up emailed their patients appointment and prescription reminders but didn’t realize it had been reaching out to their patients after visits asking for reviews. And it is likely a surprise to some of the patients whose reviews are available publicly on the site. There are candid reviews with sensitive medical data and “anonymous reviews” that contain patients’ full names and/or contact details, suggesting they didn’t realize that what they were writing was going to be made public...