
Amino analyzed health insurance claims from 188M Americans - Turukawa
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/20/9573937/amino-find-doctor-zocdoc-health-insurance-startup
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spdustin
I have a hard enough time getting my own health records from various
hospitals/doctors' offices. When I first heard of the company, I was hoping
Amino was solving that problem for me.

Is that a solved problem? Or is that a market opportunity? A sort of EMR
ombudsman for the Average Joe?

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droithomme
Clearly medical privacy does not exist.

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blennon
There are good arguments to be made about your point, but I don't think this
is necessarily one of them. As the article quotes, "The data is anonymous, but
it allows us to see where those folks have gotten care."

What Amino has done can easily be done with anonymized data. They only need to
know patient age, patient gender, physician, location of physician, what the
physician billed for (I assume the ICD-9 codes). I doubt there's enough
information there to identify individuals.

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panarky
It's surprising how much can be inferred about specific people from anonymized
data provided for research purposes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak)

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blennon
It is surprising and comments like this always pop-up in response to comments
like mine. The question is how much information do you really need to identify
individuals? I can't answer that since I haven't seen the data set they are
actually working with. In terms of the information they report, I doubt you
could identify anyone.

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panarky
Results like this make me wonder about the quality of the data.

[http://imgur.com/gcXkBj1](http://imgur.com/gcXkBj1)

This isn't just a rare exception. Search for any improbable condition and
Amino will find physicians that are supposedly treating it.

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Jemaclus
Do you think a simple edge case is a good reason to challenge the quality of
the entire data set? I'm not sure how many just-launched apps have perfect
data and are perfectly bug-free, but I'm guessing that number is pretty low.
(See: Apple Maps launch)

Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction. I can easily see
this data set getting larger and adding in other useful scenarios that would
make it more useful for patients like me.

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sjg007
This is good but insufficient. It reports # of patients seen which my be a
proxy for quality but you also have to consider the geographic area (e.g.
might be the only specialist in the area). More important is tracking
complications (could be in ICD codes as well).

