Scenarios for Health Care Reform (Part 2 of 2)

The first part of this article suggested two scenarios that could promote health care reform. We’ll finish off the scenarios in this part of the article.

Capitalism Disrupts Health Care

In the third scenario, reform is stimulated by an intrepid data science firm that takes on health care with greater success than most of its predecessors. After assembling an impressive analytics toolkit from open source software components–thus simplifying licensing–it approaches health care providers and offers them a deal they can’t refuse: analytics demonstrated to save them money and support their growth, all delivered for free. The data science firm asks in return only that they let it use deidentified data from their patients and practices to build an enhanced service that it will offer paying customers.

Andy OramSome health care providers balk at the requirement to share data, but their legal and marketing teams explain that they have been doing it for years already with companies whose motives are less commendable. Increasingly, the providers are won over. The analytics service appeals particularly to small, rural, and safety-net providers. Hammered by payment cuts and growing needs among their populations, they are on the edge of going out of business and grasp the service as their last chance to stay in the black.

Participating in the program requires the extraction of data from electronic health records, and some EHR vendors try to stand in the way in order to protect their own monopoly on the data. Some even point to clauses in their licenses that prohibit the sharing. But they get a rude message in return: so valuable are the analytics that the providers are ready to jettison the vendors in a minute. The vendors ultimately go along and even compete on the basis of their ability to connect to the analytics...