Your data has value, but unlocking it for your own benefit is challenging. Understanding how valuable data are collected and approved for use can help you to get there.
Two primary means for differentiating audiences by their data collection methods are site-authenticated data collection and people-based data collection, suggested a recent piece in BulletinHealthcare written by Justin Fadgen, chief corporate development officer for the firm.
Site-authenticated data are sourced from individual authentication events, such as when a user completes an online form, and generally agrees to a privacy policy that includes a data use agreement. User data are then be combined with other data sources that add meaning, becoming the basis of advertising targeting for instance. In marketing for healthcare, this is the National Provider Identifier (NPI), a 10-digit numeric identifier for covered healthcare providers under HIPAA.
People-based data collection does not come from a registration, but from a variety of sources that could include data licensing, research, and manual verification. These data can be loaded onto a data management platform, which aggregates data from various sources into likely groups using data science. The goal is to provide an anonymized ID to individual users. These then can be individually targeted.
People-based data may not be friendly to individual-level reporting, also called physician-level reporting. This is because no privacy policy has stipulated how the data are to be used.
Efforts to monetize patient data of the National Health Service (NHS) of England further emphasizes the value of your data. Sensyne Health, a for-profit company, is working to get divisions of the NHS to put patient information into a database. The NHS has 71 years of patient data. In recent years, it has worked to collect patient DNA data for research.
Sensyne’s initial goal, according to an account from Bloomberg, is to gather information on five million NHS patients. Ultimately, said Paul Drayson, the former UK science minister who founded Sensyne, the company hopes to get access to all 55 million members of NHS. EY consultants estimate those data might be worth $12 billion annually, money NHS could apply to patient care and health. Sensyne has so far signed up six of 150 hospital divisions in the NHS. Each division, or trust, receives Sensyne shares worth some $3 million.
The potential value is of interest to the UK government, especially with Brexit injecting more uncertainty into the economy. “How the NHS works with the global life sciences industry is key to the health of the nation,” Drayson stated.
Other groups are looking data as a business model.
