I’m so sorry. I hear advertising stories like this more and more frequently and I wonder when the US will at least ban targeted advertising based on health data - actual and inferred. It‘s despicable.

Thanks, I appreciate the thought.

We felt really violated by this, and I ended up buying the marketing list in question for my zip code to understand what happened better. It’s unlikely anything will change for the better. The scrubbing of identity data is pretty easy to reverse engineer by design, as the stream of data is used by pharmaceutical companies, insurance subrogation, etc to do all sorts of things. A pharmaceutical sales rep has a scorecard for your doctor — they bpm now how many scripts were written and filled. The people who gather prescription data have your prescription before your pharmacy does.

Some states have fed things like Medicaid claim data to companies to mesh against data from insurers to build models designed to target opioid abuse. By correlating events or behaviors tied to abuse to diagnoses, predictive models can be built from unprivileged data. (Remember when Target predicted someone’s pregnancy before they knew a few years ago?)

It also doesn't seem to stop organizations with your PII from using your health records to market to you.

When I came down with a particular condition, I started receiving advertising solicitations from Walgreens about.

Hospitals and practices make signing over the right to share your data with whomever they please a routine process.