Do you run for a big party ? Have you been having back pain ? Your society belike knows about it already thanks to in high spirits - tech healthcare society that it hired . Welcome to our braw new universe of big data point .
The Wall Street Journal has a chilling new report about the way that company like Walmart and J.P. Morgan Chase are using self-aggrandizing data mining to track thehealth of their employees . And it ’s no surprise that the methods are raising plenty of privacy concerns .
The troupe hire third - political party house likeCastlight Healthcareto analyze the aggregate data of their employee . And they claim that it ’s not only a room to reduce down on their health care poster , but a peachy way to keep employees sizable .
As theWall Street Journal reports , spinal surgery can cost $ 20,000 or more . So when Castlight attain that 30 percent of Walmart employee who got second opinions prefer not to get back surgery , the vendor made a concerted effort to pass along with employee about alternative options . Those option naturally include encouraging employee to get a 2nd opinion .
The exercise is newfangled enough that most people do n’t know that their personal wellness info is being monitored by a third party charter by their employer . But in the human beings of big data , there ’s really no way to finish it .
Companies use vendors like Castlight , Welltok , andGNS Healthcareto count on out things like who might be at danger for diabetes or a kernel flack , which vocalize selfless enough , until you realize these vendors also get over whether a woman is seek to get significant . The companies use a variety of method , include look at the searches made by employee on third company health care apps .
From theWall Street Journal :
To see which employees might soon get significant , Castlight recently launched a novel production that scan policy claim to find women who have stopped filling birth - control prescriptions , as well as woman who have made fertility - relate searches on Castlight ’s health app .
That data is matched with the fair sex ’s age , and if applicable , the ages of her children to figure the likeliness of an impending pregnancy , say Jonathan Rende , Castlight ’s chief research and development policeman . She would then start have emails or in - app messages with tips for choosing an obstetrician or other antepartum care . If the algorithm guess wrong , she could opt out of receive similar subject matter .
There are all kinds of ways that engineering has helped people live longer and healthier lives over the retiring C . But those same tools that help someone determine their risk for disease can also be used by corporations to fake their employees ’ legal action .
Welcome to our brave new healthcare dystopia .
[ WSJ ]
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