The big health data bazaar: uncovering a multi-billion dollar trade in our medical secrets

Hidden to consumers, patient medical data has become a multi-billion dollar worldwide trade between our health care providers, drug companies, and a complex web of middlemen.

This great medical data bazaar sells copies of the prescription you recently filled, hospital records, insurance claims, blood test results, and more, stripped of names but possibly with some identifiers such as year of birth, gender, and doctor.

As computing grows ever more sophisticated, these patient dossiers are increasingly vulnerable to re-identification, which could make them a target for identity thieves or hackers.

Paradoxically, comprehensive electronic files for patient treatment- the reason medical data exists in the first place - remain an elusive goal.

Even today, patients or their doctors rarely have easy access to comprehensive records that could improve care.

In the evolution of medical data, the instinct for profit has outstripped patient needs.

This book tells the human, behind-the-scenes story of how such a system evolved internationally.

This story begins with New York advertising man Ludwig Wolfgang Frohlich, who founded IMS Health, the world's dominant health data miner, in the 1950s.

IMS Health now gathers patient medical data from more than 45 billion transactions annually from 780,000 data feeds in more than 100 countries.

This narrative seeks to spark debate on how we can best balance the promise big data offers to advance medicine and improve lives while preserving the rights and interests of every patient.

We, the patients, deserve a say in this discussion. After all, it's our data.