The New York Times article When 2+2 Equals a Privacy Question raises some serious medical data privacy concerns.
But by 2020, when a vast majority of American health providers are expected to have electronic health systems, the data mining component alone could generate sales of up to $5 billion...
The magnitude of data needed to generate that kind a revenue is significant. The likelihood that "de-identification" of someone's health information will occur is very high. "Anonymized" Data Really Isn't points out the same thing that the NYT article does:
Computer scientists over the past fifteen years show that it is quite straightforward to extract personal information by analyzing seemingly unrelated, “anonymized” data sets.
The demand for the secondary use of health data (and here) is high because it is believed it will
Significantly improve the quality of patient care and offers the promise of even greater benefits in the future.
Many feel that use of secondary health information should be regulated by the government.
Here's a good overview that covers many health data secondary use issues: Toward a National Framework for the Secondary Use of Health Data: An American Medical Informatics Association White Paper.
UPDATE (10/20/09): Also see the Wired article Medical Records: Stored in the Cloud, Sold on the Open Market.
