According to the report, the pandemic-era rise of telehealth and therapy apps has created a market boom for mental health data, and data brokers are capitalizing on it by reselling it for government or commercial use.
A research team at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy recently published a study that analyzed the market for U.S. mental health data and found that 11 companies were willing to sell bundles of healthcare data.
The information the companies were offering included “what antidepressants people were taking, whether they struggled with insomnia or attention issues, and details on other medical ailments.”
The researchers also reported that other brokers offered personally identifiable patient data that included names, addresses and incomes.
Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke who ran the research team, said it was as if data brokers were providing its customers “a tasting menu for buying people’s health data.”
Currently, under HIPAA there is no law prohibiting the use of healthcare data shared via marketing practices.
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