5 ms·

Amino analyzed health insurance claims from 188M Americans

15 points by Turukawa 11y ago

droithomme 11y ago
Clearly medical privacy does not exist.
- blennon 11y ago
  There are good arguments to be made about your point, but I don't think this is necessarily one of them. As the article quotes, "The data is anonymous, but it allows us to see where those folks have gotten care." What Amino has done can easily be done with anonymized data. They only need to know patient age, patient gender, physician, location of physician, what the physician billed for (I assume the ICD-9 codes). I doubt there's enough information there to identify individuals.
  - panarky 11y ago
    It's surprising how much can be inferred about specific people from anonymized data provided for research purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak
    - blennon 11y ago
      It is surprising and comments like this always pop-up in response to comments like mine. The question is how much information do you really need to identify individuals? I can't answer that since I haven't seen the data set they are actually working with. In terms of the information they report, I doubt you could identify anyone.
- bduerst 11y ago
  It's claims data, probably with the primary PII stripped. If they're HIPAA compliant, is there really an issue?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
spdustin 11y ago
I have a hard enough time getting my own health records from various hospitals/doctors' offices. When I first heard of the company, I was hoping Amino was solving that problem for me. Is that a solved problem? Or is that a market opportunity? A sort of EMR ombudsman for the Average Joe?
sjg007 11y ago
This is good but insufficient. It reports # of patients seen which my be a proxy for quality but you also have to consider the geographic area (e.g. might be the only specialist in the area). More important is tracking complications (could be in ICD codes as well).
panarky 11y ago
Results like this make me wonder about the quality of the data. http://imgur.com/gcXkBj1 http://imgur.com/gcXkBj1 This isn't just a rare exception. Search for any improbable condition and Amino will find physicians that are supposedly treating it.
- Jemaclus 11y ago
  Do you think a simple edge case is a good reason to challenge the quality of the entire data set? I'm not sure how many just-launched apps have perfect data and are perfectly bug-free, but I'm guessing that number is pretty low. (See: Apple Maps launch) Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction. I can easily see this data set getting larger and adding in other useful scenarios that would make it more useful for patients like me.

15 points by Turukawa 11y ago

droithomme 11y ago

Clearly medical privacy does not exist.

blennon 11y ago
There are good arguments to be made about your point, but I don't think this is necessarily one of them. As the article quotes, "The data is anonymous, but it allows us to see where those folks have gotten care." What Amino has done can easily be done with anonymized data. They only need to know patient age, patient gender, physician, location of physician, what the physician billed for (I assume the ICD-9 codes). I doubt there's enough information there to identify individuals.
- panarky 11y ago
  It's surprising how much can be inferred about specific people from anonymized data provided for research purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak
  - blennon 11y ago
    It is surprising and comments like this always pop-up in response to comments like mine. The question is how much information do you really need to identify individuals? I can't answer that since I haven't seen the data set they are actually working with. In terms of the information they report, I doubt you could identify anyone.
bduerst 11y ago
It's claims data, probably with the primary PII stripped. If they're HIPAA compliant, is there really an issue?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

spdustin 11y ago

I have a hard enough time getting my own health records from various hospitals/doctors' offices. When I first heard of the company, I was hoping Amino was solving that problem for me. Is that a solved problem? Or is that a market opportunity? A sort of EMR ombudsman for the Average Joe?

sjg007 11y ago

This is good but insufficient. It reports # of patients seen which my be a proxy for quality but you also have to consider the geographic area (e.g. might be the only specialist in the area). More important is tracking complications (could be in ICD codes as well).

panarky 11y ago

Results like this make me wonder about the quality of the data. http://imgur.com/gcXkBj1 http://imgur.com/gcXkBj1 This isn't just a rare exception. Search for any improbable condition and Amino will find physicians that are supposedly treating it.

Jemaclus 11y ago
Do you think a simple edge case is a good reason to challenge the quality of the entire data set? I'm not sure how many just-launched apps have perfect data and are perfectly bug-free, but I'm guessing that number is pretty low. (See: Apple Maps launch) Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction. I can easily see this data set getting larger and adding in other useful scenarios that would make it more useful for patients like me.