Bloomberg.com recently had an article that highlighted the potential use of any available data to better understand their patients’/customers’ health and fitness lifestyle. This is essentially the same information that retailers use to market new products to potential new customers, so it is not as if we’re plowing completely new ground. It instead raises a more personal conversation that everyone is not ready to jump into.
The opportunity to learn more about someone’s real medical status may sound an alarm from privacy advocates, but the real issue is more about lifestyle honesty. It is important for doctors, medical groups, and insurers to know if their prospective patients are being forthright about what they do when they’re not sitting in front of the doctor in his office. We are all guilty of painting a rosy picture when the white cloaks ask questions about whether we’re doing what we need to take care of ourselves. However, it may take a combination of both big data analysis from the medical and insurance community and an active participation from the patients to get to a more honest assessment of what we really do once we leave the office.
Not only can medical groups leverage the same consumer oriented information that is gathered to market products to us, but wearable technology is soon going to help make us active participants in the battle to become real. traditional data can provide a far better and honest picture of how we take care of ourselves.
From a medical perspective, this is smart preventive medicine. From and insurance perspective, it lowers the risk by knowing who that individual really is that you’re insuring and charging the appropriate cost to cover that risk. It is conceivable (and hopeful) that the combination of both actually lowers both medical cost and insurance premiums. At that point, for those of us who are skeptical about the privacy issues, the cost of healthcare and insurance, for those willing to give up a little privacy for lower cost for the result, will lead us to the path that makes that honesty pill a lot easier to swallow.
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