Study Results from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Update Understanding of Big Data (Big Data, Precision Medicine and Private Insurance: a Delicate Balancing Act)

2020 JAN 21 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Research findings on Information Technology - Big Data are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting out of Zurich, Switzerland, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “In this paper, we discuss how access to health-related data by private insurers, other than affecting the interests of prospective policy-holders, can also influence their propensity to make personal data available for research purposes. We take the case of national precision medicine initiatives as an illustrative example of this possible tendency.”

Financial supporters for this research include Project ‘Postgenomic Solidarity. European Life Insurance in the Era of Personalised Medicine’, Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Swiss National Science Foundation.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, “Precision medicine pools together unprecedented amounts of genetic as well as phenotypic data. The possibility that private insurers could claim access to such rapidly accumulating biomedical Big Data or to health-related information derived from it would discourage people from enrolling in precision medicine studies. Should that be the case, the economic value of personal data for the insurance industry would end up affecting the public value of data as a scientific resource.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “In what follows we articulate three principles - trustworthiness, openness and evidence - to address this problem and tame its potentially harmful effects on the development of precision medicine and, more generally, on the advancement of medical science.”

For more information on this research see: Big Data, Precision Medicine and Private Insurance: a Delicate Balancing Act. Big Data & Society, 2019;6(1):. Big Data & Society can be contacted at: Sage Publications Inc, 2455 Teller Rd, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320, USA.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting A. Blasimme, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Dept. of Health Sciences and Technology, Hlth Eth & Policy Lab, 17 Auf Mauer, Ch-8092 Zurich, Switzerland. Additional authors for this research include E. Vayena and I. Van Hoyweghen.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719830111. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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