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Larry Page: Healthcare Data Mining Could Save 100,000 Lives a Year
An anonymous reader writes Google often gets criticism for its seemingly boundless desire for data collection and analysis, but the company says it has higher ambitions than just figuring out how best to serve advertising. Speaking to the NY Times, Larry Page said, "We get so worried about these things that we don't get the benefits Right now we don't data-mine healthcare data. If we did we'd probably save 100,000 lives next year." By "these things," he means privacy concerns and fear that the data might be misused. But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
How many fingers am I holding up?
Screw you Google. "Do no evil" my ass.
This is just another instance of him saying "trust us, we're google, give us all your private information, what could possibly go wrong".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
Not that much... A lot of these things...
Not that much... A lot of these things...
Not that much... A lot of these things...
... it should NOT be done. Didn't you notice we have an over-population problem Larry ?
100,000 people who will NEVER DIE. And this is EVERY YEAR. Let's move forward with this plan NOW!
Fox: Having us guard the hen house MIGHT save 100,000 chickens per year.
Does that mean we should ban cars?
It is true, healthcare data mining could save many lives. The problem is nobody trusts health insurance companies because most of them (a) deliberately make it hard to deal with them in order to get people to give up on collecting claims, (b) refuse to cover at least some of the people we know when they need medical treatment, and (c) limit the quality of care received from most doctors. So nobody trusts them to abstain from using the information to come up with some reason to exclude you either from coverage in the marketplace or for a particular condition.
Larry Page said, "We get so worried about these things that we don't get the benefits Right now we don't data-mine healthcare data. If we did we'd probably save 100,000 lives next year." By "these things," he means privacy concerns and fear that the data might be misused.
And by "probably save 100,000 lives next year" Larry means "some numbers I pulled out of my ass to make this idea sound good".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Should let Google track the amount of time that people spend in front of phones/laptops/pcs. Then, they can send us a warning "Go Exercise Losers!"
^(oo)^pig~
Given that people are essentially Google's product, or the source of it in terms of information, it makes business sense the Google would be interested in protecting the flock so the company can continue to shear the sheep regularly.
It would be more worrisome if Google found a way to have the dead be more profitable than the living and decided it should go into the mutton business.
See, as an extremely rich and powerful BILLIONAIRE, he doesn't have to give a fuck about anything. He doesn't have to worry that any negative information against him will prevent him from getting a job, loan, or harassed.
We peons have to worry. ADA, EEOC, or other laws preventing discrimination?
AhHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Why you weren't hired because you have AIDs, too old, cancer, Bi-Polar, ....! No sir! You don't have the skills!
PROVE otherwise. Oh, and good luck getting that $3,000 retainer for a lawyer (Contingency fees? How quaint.)
Privacy is necessary because there are folks who will harm you out of there own ignorance or fear that you will somehow harm them.
how about you give back a small percentage of your riches and save even more lives.
There is a HUGE pool of untapped resources. Insurance companies process claims for millions, and have all the data, what is being prescribed, what is not being prescribed.. how long the perscription is for..... Who is seeing a doctor on a regular basis, and who isn't.... Using this data you can find out what treatments are being effective, and which ones aren't. Or is it really worth going to the dentist every 6 months? Isn't that worth it's weight in gold?
Internally insurance companies can summarize data without compromising their client's as they have the data all ready. Moving it to an external company would involve generating an guid for each identifying piece of information before it leaves the company. Basically a complete scrubbing of the data, but it is not an impossible task.
Why won't this happen? It's not a privacy issue, it a $$$$ issue.... Drug companies wouldn't want you to find out that they are selling snake oil.. They could loose millions if a report showed that their drug is not as effective as a competitors....
The number of people who don't get hired because the shrub in their front yard is trimmed crooked is considerably lower than the number of people who don't get hired because they have MS, cancer or some other chronic disease that will cost the company's insurer big bucks and drive up the cost of insurance and cost the company in lost productivity when they're incapacitated. Oh sorry, I meant, don't get hired because they "aren't a good fit with the company culture".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
the Republicans will never let this happen. With their current rule of this country, expect to see nothing like that helps the people to be allowed. That is the way of their kind. It's sad to see health care here destroyed by them. We could have, as an example from just yesterday, had a country where huge soft drinks aren't shoved down our throats, but instead the Republicans got the common sense measures reversed in order to hurt the health of this country. Again, that is the way of their kind.
the subject says it all.
I work as a statistician for a hospital chain. We already do data mining and have interventions for our sickest patients. Our experience, consistent with the medical literature, has shown that badgering patients with whatever "preventative" interventions increase hospitalizations and other costs. These programs persist because of a statistical illusion of regression to the mean -- people tend to be enrolled in such programs when their health is at a nadir, then they stabilize therafter. It makes it appear as if the intervention reduced utilization. In fact, a proper comparison shows that it actually increases utilization. Does Google think that spamming millions of people with robo-calls about eating apples will improve anything?
Ibbity bibbity, sibbity sab. ...but all these 21st century privacy invading snoopsters need to be thrown into that furnace to fuel it.
Ibbity bibbity, canal boat.
Dictionary. Down the ferry.
Mary Mary, quite contrary.
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy lost his hair.
Scooba-doo and scooba-die,
That chicken`s not too young to fry.
Life is real, life is earnest.
If you`re cold, turn up the furnace.
Several companies already do what is mentioned in this article. http://www.sentryds.com/ would be an example of how this is already being done. http://www.businessweek.com/ad... (and the marketing swag).
So would banning abortion on demand... So what is his point?
The 100,000 is a nonsense number pulled out of his posterior. I have a number just as good: 0. Larry Page forgets the wild miss of Google Flu these past years: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Banning cars could save more lives - Does that mean we should ban cars?
What effects would that have on the economic productivity of the country ? In turn, how much poverty will that create ? How many extra people will die as a result of not affording medical care ?
And this is a simple utilitarian exercise where you compare lives lost with lives lost. What about more complex dilemmas (see title of post) ? Should a nation never send troops in any conflict and accept any onerous terms the adversary imposes, for the sake of preserving all lives ? Should we ban all individual choice and responsibility, ban all sugary drinks, impose a state-controlled healthy diet ?
The notion that "lives can be saved" is not and cannot be used as the sole deciding argument on a societal issue. We are free individuals, we associate in a community seeking to improve our perceived welfare - one cannot treat the welfare as a goal in itself segregated from what we as individuals want.
How I do love thee!
A lot of things *are* like that, Larry. Sure, we let you datamine our medical records and things get a little better, in mostly unquantifiable, macro-medical ways. But how long before you want to start giving out that data to marketers?
How long before the insurance companies before the insurance companies start offering incentives to give up that information? Then how long before it's mandatory and there's no carrot, just stick?
Then, the government starts requiring it. Now, I'm not against government per se - I think it's a pretty good thing most days, except when they using my tax dollars to bomb brown people for oil or killing American citizens without a trial because ... well, I'm not sure why since you locked up those records.
Anyway, the slippery slope is there and we're getting better at spotting it, and you, Larry, are standing somewhere in the middle of it, trying to encourage us to come on up.
Not buying it this time.
With all due respect Larry Page, and I mean this very respectfully
FUCK YOU. FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU
First off, tweaking out those few extra heartbeats as we figure out how to keep you alive a couple years longer while you lie completely demented, catheterized in your bed in the Nusring home, is to what or who's benefit? Oh, yeah - the nursing home takes all your accumulated wealth, your retirement, your house, then Your SS. And the healthier they keep you the longer they can stretch out the dying process, the more profit. The goal is to transfer all your money to them and not your family.
Do not for a minute think that the actuaries haven't figured out the moment your income to them exceeds their profit projection, Your bed could then be filled by someone who still has wealth they can tap into. After which you're just carrion.
The problem with saving those 100,000 lives is they won't be in the healthy productive years. So Larry, No thank you. There are some things worse than death. Living in a world where you don't even own your body anymore is one of those things
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In the end, this data will only be used to restrict care by algorithm, saving insurance company profits, at the expense of those lives which were statistically 'inconvenient'. Only with a single payer system could this achieve the ends Mr Page cites. My guess is far more than 100K lives will be lost in persuit of this new profit.
The parent is talking about the Medical Information Bureau - MIB - notice the bullshit in the gray box.
With MIB, Lexis Nexus, Acxiom, credit bureaus and government collecting information about us, we are living in a corporate state that would make an East German Stasi agent cream his pants.
Dear Larry Page;
You want to save lives? Then use some of your vast personal fortune to research and discover a cure for cancer, rather than try and convince me that I should give my private information to your company so you can get richer.
Fuckhead.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Also: Read an article a while back re: Google's influenza tracker/predictor. Long answer short, missed the marks by a mile. As the article stated, for example, just because someone looks up "flu symptoms", doesn't mean they have the flu, and the IP address for the search might not correlate to where someone might have actually caught the bug (e.g. person is on a business trip right now; sure might be a valuable data point for where this person is spreading the disease).
Can't imagine spreading this out to more serious ailments.
The sooner projects like IBM's Watson can get their teeth into our medical data the sooner our lives will be much improved. I spent 8 hard years suffering from Celiac disease before receiving a diagnosis. There is much to be done in the medical field.
.... said the Spider to the Fly.
Seriously - once this genie is out of the bottle there is no way to bottle it back up. The fear of employment repercussions, insurance, etc all become a concern.
“For me, I’m so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite," he told the New York Times's Farhad Manjoo. "We get so worried about these things that we don’t get the benefits Right now we don’t data-mine healthcare data. If we did we’d probably save 100,000 lives next year."
Eeesh.. I heard this same logic, earlier this year, being applied to the pooling of all NHS records for pharmacons and researches to peel through in the UK. "Think of all the causality linking and better and better benefits".. Eeep! What?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
http://www.nhs.uk/nhsengland/t...
to prevent disclosure to marketing assholes and other "profile" buliders.
ssshh, we dont the big dummies buying them
Yes, if you have AIDS, I can easily see that you want to keep it secret.
But I value my privacy immensely (no facebook for me), but feel fine telling the world I have kidney disease.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I used to read 2000AD comic as a kid and they had a character called Robo Hunter. Anyways, he had a robot cigar that used to constantly nag him to give up smoking.
Fast forward to now and we're going to have people's phones nagging them about what they eat/drink/sleep with and all that info will be shoved into giant databases & sold to insurance companies. So Google will advertise junk food & other shit & then grass you up to the authorities if you buy too many of the crap they advertise. Meanwhile we're being encouraged to buy 'smart watches' which will helpfully transmit to the big corps our heart rate & how much exercise we do as well as other personal information (keep that watch on when you're having sex or jacking off & they'll know about that, too).
Holy fuck, the 21st century is depressing.
in the end of it all just another several 100,000 pounds of junk n trash left over in landfills. maybe they can fix people's will to not care about this dying earth instead of engineering its collapse
The only question is who will play the role of Alec Sadler.
Neat! I have a better Idea. If we had a sensor that we embedded in everyone's rectum that made regularly made API calls to a government database with a list of "banned substances" (think transfats, tobbaco, drugs, etc...) and would detonate on contact with those substances we should save tens of millions of lives!
Mr. Page, what you don't get is that, we are just as smart as you are. We understand the benefits. What you are missing is that the rest of us also, unlike you, understand the costs. You're a moron in this regard. We've weighed pros and cons and we've said "No" So please go away now.
"Customers who suffered this disease also purchased diagnostic tests for ..."
-kgj
"Rectum" and "detonate on contact" ... your answer may serve Justice -- but who will clean up the mess?
-kgj
We have far cheaper and more effective ways to curb yearly mortality in americans. If we focus on preventable disease and nutrition before we start pumping cash into silicon valley, the long term benefit will most certainly be greater than healthcare datamine moneytrain 4.0. here are some starters:
outlaw cigarette smoking: make a big dent in the 480,000 deaths per year it causes.
clamp down on fast food and set a realistic dietary outline for americans, not one bought and paid for by the dairy industry: make a dent in the 600,000 people who die yearly from coronary artery disease. youll also save countless others from cancer and stroke as exercise and diet play a crucial component in these health conditions as well.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If data were only provided to doctors and legitimate research institutions I would be fine. Google would never do that as there would not be enough money in it. If the data is going to be sold to the insurance industry, then no, I'm not fine. If the data is going to be sent to the government (CDC, HHS) without being aggregated and having personally identifying information removed, then no, I'm not fine.
This is just one more example of Google's "ends justify the means" logic which only works if individual human beings have no value and therefore rights such as privacy aren't worth protecting. What is more, Google seems to be conveniently ignoring the fact that none of us were given a choice in having these so-called "benefits" foisted upon us. Are things like Street View "cool" or even useful? I think most people would agree that they are to an extent, but that is not the same thing as wishing for a world where Google spying on us is an unavoidable part of our daily lives. Mr. Page seems to have confused adoption with agreement.
The problem with Google isn't that they are "evil" in the malevolent sense. The problem is simply that they wield too much power over our lives with too little accountability. They lack the humility to recognize that just because they think something is good for the world doesn't make it so. Google seems to confuse "not being evil" with "having good intentions" and that lack of understanding makes them the most evil company of all. Perhaps the nine most frightening words in the English language in the new century (to borrow from Ronald Reagan) are: "I'm from Google and I'm here to help."
of dying early but living free of massive corporate influence over my health and daily life.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
the hight tech electronic record I find most efficient is the ...hand-written list of medications and allergies. lots of people still show up in doctors offices without this life-saving information.
Don't need a Google project to fix this.
In Malawi, every patient is required to hand carry a simple notebook (health passport) to each doctor visit. The doctor write one line about the visit. Presto. all tha p[atients essential medical info i sin one record.
Very very well put.
Sure, people will bitch and moan. Why doesn't the city just apply an exorbitant tax to all sugary drinks, regardless of size?
Neat, had to look that one up.
100,000 lives could be lost every year because they couldn't afford their new premiums.
"But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
No Larry, the privacy concerns have not melted away. You've simply ignored the issue except where forced by the courts and keep repeating that the privacy issue has gone away - and people believe you because you have the bully pulpit and defenders of privacy don't.
When Google started, we trusted the company because they didn't have adds on the main search page. We supported them because they were the underdog and Yahoo was too commercialized. I believe Larry Page had good intentions. Then the inevitable need to drive revenue comes to the forefront and targeted advertising takes center stage. The goldmine of user information is harvested. Larry Page, I believe does not see the evil. The power that comes from from mass information collection will always be misused. Larry Page, maybe you actually want to save lives by mining health data, but truly those with a pure profit motive will misuse the information to the detriment of us all. In Google you helped create a monster. Now do the right thing and keep the monster out of our personal lives.
If it were that wonderful, it might save more like 1,000,000 lives a year. 100,000 is potentially a rounding error or redefinition game in measurement.
Major poicy mistakes that enslave us or cause a social meltdown like a revolution, might cost millions of lives per year.
One of the principal problems with health and healthcare today is that individuals, groups an corporations have been shaving and flaking largely unseen pieces of the public's health off for a lousy "profit" this past century with scams, defective goods and techniques known to somebody. We should trust you now with our most personal information that be used as weapons and chains ?
I am *sooo* looking forward to my Glass-enabled Bluetooth rectal thermometer!
As under there plan that data can get you blacklisted makeing your only doctor the ER and the jail / prison system.
The Federal Government already does this too https://www.ccwdata.org/
-- If you're posting to be funny, and your sig is funnier . . . .
You mean the general public wasnt savvy enough and google fended off all the lawsuits wth good lawyering and PR until you finally got your act together and made the autoface blurring and license plate blurring feature 4 years later?
Larry Page is just complaining that Google doesn't have the data. These data already exist and are being extensively studied by researchers in academics, government, health insurers, employers, and pharmaceutical companies. The de-identified data can be licensed and analyzed by anyone. The fully identifiable information is routinely analyzed by the owners of the data.
The problem is not access to the data, the problem is that it is difficult to make valid inferences about causation from observational data.
If you look at his comment in the context of previous comments he has made you will see that what he meant was to mine it while preserving anonymity.
Assuming we're all now on the same page, let's focus on the technical problem.
It's really an interesting technical problem. Can you mine data while provably maintaining people's anonymity. It's similar to the voting problem, can you count votes while preserving people's anonymity -- *and* prove correctly, to the common user that their votes were counted and their anonymity maintained. The way anonymity is maintained in healthcare is that there is a huge fine (250,000 per violation) and a possible jail time associated with violating someone's medical privacy (unfortunately with voting the correct incentives are not there). Anyway, now we need to solve the technical problem. In voting it was mostly solved by the "gold standard" Australian paper ballot. Can we solve it somehow for healthcare?
Can you have your health data vote (anonymously) for certain health data mining results without it compromising your privacy? And can you transparently prove the correctness of the vote and the anonymity of the user?
It would be an awesome problem to solve.
-anwar
Some lives will be ended but if you want to make an omelet.
I'm actually shocked by the shortsightedness of the slashdot crowd on this one. I expected at least -some- positive responses to be moderated up. Instead, I see a lot of misconceptions and ignorance of the actual problem Page, like Aubrey Degray, is trying to address.
We have a hundred thousand people worldwide dying due to various medical problems and the diseases of old age. These medical problems and diseases are complicated. They consist of tens of thousands of interlocking subproblems, so many that we often take several thousand specific issues and lump them together to call them something like 'cancer'. Fixing these problems - all of them - isn't something that a single drug company, or a single nation is going to do.
It's going to take everybody, everywhere. And in order to fix all these things - cancers, diseases of old age, genetic problems, and more - is going to take research, time, and data. Lots of data.
Lots and lots of data.
People whine about privacy, oh no the bad guys are going to steal my information, ignoring the fact that a hundred thousand people a day die and that thier information could help. All of these medical problems are tractable, all of them are soluble, but they'd be a hell of a lot easier to solve if researchers weren't hamstrung by ridiculous information privacy restrictions.
I don't want immortality in good health just for me, I want it for everyone, and this idiotic fear of having information released is standing in the way of that. A hundred thousand people a day dead, because we fear someone might discover an abnormally BPH score, HIV, or a genetic propensity for Alzheimers. What a steaming load of shortsighted crap.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
you know, just traditional ****HEALTH CARE**** could save 100K lives per year...
health care is being made artificially scarce to prop up at huge industry that has a bad business model...doesn't **need** a business model
I agree Page is out of touch, foolish, and amoral...but the greater problem is artificial scarcity
Thank you Dave Raggett
All that data could just as easily be used for death panels to decide who gets to die, too.
financing the studies on washing hands could save far more lives than that dystopian nightmare Larry and co are building.
there is so much to do with simple procedure to saves lives, that that big data thing...
please take a look at that book about the Dr Pittet, the actual problem of nosocomial infections, and the so simple procedure that prevent millions of lives to be saved, but which is undermined by pharma tech companies: http://blog.tcrouzet.com/clean-hands-save-lives/
The story also unfold the same way libre software had, and tend to the same political conclusion : Commonism (not communism!)
Unfortunately Google people think every solution requires a loss of privacy. Can you imagine anyone with any sense to put your personal information in the hands of one person, one company, one entity? After all, Google is just a ad company selling hardware. You want to trust them with all your information?
One thing I know about the Googlites is that when they make a public statement like this, it's usually pretty conservative. Self-driving cars seemed like a pipe dream, but they're just about here, and it's for real.
In fact, Google has been working for years to use their information for predicting disease breakouts in a more general sense. If he says 100,000 lives, they've probably already done the math to support that statement.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Depends whose doing the mining.
The IRS?
either "for the children" or "potentially saving {insert large number here} lives"
Whenever somebody of ANY political or business stripe makes such a claim, WATCH OUT and think very hard about what you might lose along the way (and what they do not want you to think about. Now that healthcare is tied to the Federal budget, EVERY person's health is a government expense and therefor a government concern.... so now each person's lifestyle choices are government concerns and the government and big businesses are looking for ways to "work together" for the benefit of both (but not necessarily YOU)
Privacy invasion is not a must to data mine and save lives. But it will be the only option offered by corps. Benefits in exchange for monopoly-increasing solutions. Check a privacy aware, decentralized solution that won't come from corporations: 0SPi.com
But... you're comparing Google to $someone... they, Google, has a pretty solid track record when it comes to extracting useful information out of huge datasets.
Really? That's it?
You could save that many without the mass surveillance, just by increasing hospital staff and ERT numbers.
Make it millions and you'll have my attention.
Tens of millions and you'll have my whole hearted support and participation.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
As we approach 9 billion people a planet with resources that are already being stretched thin while we have a hard time dealing with all the toxic waste we create such as not to toxify the environment, does it really make sense to emphasize saving 100,000s of thousands of lives? Think of all the water, air, and oil they will consume.
My proposals: https://www.changemakers.com/m...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
While you make a good point, nutrition works right now (along with exercise, good sleep, a less stressful lifestyle, avoiding hazards like smoking, community connectedness, and so on like in "Blue Zones"). The rest of life extension is just a hope that maybe we can create new technologies. Also, for most people, if they can make it in good health to 100+ years old via such well-proved things, they will then be around for more breakthroughs in the next 50+ years.
Also, probably most invasive life extension technologies for extreme longevity could also be turned into biological weapons (like rewriting DNA or reorganizing the brain). So, we may end up with technologies that could allow people to live in good health for 1000s of years, have any skin color or nose shape they want, and people will use them to kill off everyone else that has a different skin color or nose shape then they currently have (which would be very sadly ironic). Improved nutrition does not have that existential risk associated with it for the most part.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.