ClickZ Webinar: Privacy As A Brand Asset

Photo credit: philosophyblog.com.au (Creative Commons)

Though you'll never hear them say so publicly, many health care organizations view privacy as just another costly bureaucratic mandate, not a strategic differentiator.  Have you ever seen a hospital or medical practice compete as "the organization best equipped to protect your privacy?"  I thought not.

And I can't explain why this is so.  Certainly the "protect my privacy" segment is, numerically, substantial enough to gain an astute marketer's attention.

Perhaps some marketers underestimate their customers' privacy concerns.  Or it could be that, when push comes to shove, health care consumers value other things in their health care experience more than they value privacy, in which case those marketers are making a smart decision about priorities.

It could be that health care organizations are (rightly) terrified of making a brand promise they can't keep.  Perhaps 'privacy' lacks the sex appeal of  brands built around 'high-tech' or 'high-touch' (though you'd think the appeal of such mental gyrations would have worn off long ago.)   

Or, maybe, to health care organizations, privacy is just not a branding issue.  Compliance maybe, but not branding.  I think that's a mistake.  Great brands are built around what people care about...a lot.  The evidence is that people care about privacy...a lot.  So...

This webinar from ClickZ Academy is not specifically devoted to issues of health care privacy but might offer some useful insights to health care strategists looking to embed "privacy-by-design" in marketing campaigns.

Making Privacy a Brand Asset; August 28, 2012 @ 2:00 PM EDT.  Session length: 60 minutes

"With the emergence of "Big Data", marketers are now equipped with an unparalleled ability to target and convert key audiences online. While companies are concerned over how to effectively leverage massive databases of personal information, consumers are concerned more than ever about the privacy of their data in corporate hands. Did you know that 60% of consumers are more concerned today about their online privacy than they were a year ago?"

More information, here.

3:31 PM

Was Google lobbying Washington for HIPAA exclusion of their PHR effort?

At "Should Google Seek the Resignations of Those Responsible for This Healthcare IT Debacle?" I expressed great concern about what I term the cross occupational intrusion of the IT industry into healthcare.

My major concern in that post was how the information technologists at Google, even with nearly unlimited access to capital (and therefore to the world's informatics expertise) badly mismanaged a Personal Health Records (PHR) project through commission of a most fundamental biomedical information science blunder (quite distinct from IT; most IT technologists and MIS personnel really stink at biomedical information science). They tried to map relatively ungranular, imprecise, and often misused billing codes back to enduser-viewable diagnoses, resulting in easily predictable patient panic and mayhem.

As usual in HIT: it's possibly even worse.

I am quite concerned about a letter from the consumer education and advocacy organization Consumer Watchdog.org and their allegations that Google has been lobbying Congress to be excluded from HIPAA provisions on privacy and forbidding sales of medical records. The letter, dated April 22, is here (http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/LtrSchmidt042209.pdf).

Considering that Google is heavily into the PHR space, and even worse, considering they made an Informatics 101 error in attempting to map billing codes into user-viewable diagnostic data, I would (and I'm sure others would as well) view such attempts if they indeed occurred as ominous, a true heavy handed intrusion of the IT industry not only into the affairs of medicine but into what really is another human rights issue. (I'd pointed out another potential HIT-related human rights issue at the post "UPMC as Proving Ground for IT Tests On Children".)

I would be interested in additional information on the Google lobbying issue, especially from those at Harvard and other academic centers who have been involved in the Google PHR initiative.

I have shared these concerns with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) clinical information systems workgroup (cis-wg) and the people & organizational issues workgroup (poi-wg) as well.

I hope the Consumer Watchdog allegations are not accurate, because if they are valid, the implications of national EHR grow increasingly unsettling.

10:43 AM