[DEDLINE]

For my W2 job, I broker the commercial sale of "real world evidence". It's usually hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical claims data. The buyer is largely big pharma. They want it for things like monitoring a patient's journey and adverse events related to their drugs. There's use-cases in clinical development and pre-market as well.

As archaic as HIPAA is, the tools that we have today to obfuscate PHI (e.g. tokenization) respect the individual's privacy. The major cloud infrastructure providers are all HITRUST certified and ready to sign BAAs to keep everyone accountable.

I think we're in a good place right now for innovation with healthcare data. Multi-modal (think genome + claims + social determinants of health) are starting to become a thing. As a population, we'll benefit from more targeted therapies.

Technology is catching up with the swaths of data that has been amassed since the 2000's. I hope for more innovation vs. shackling it with uninformed regulation.