Mining the Data Oceans, Profiting on the Margins

Abstract

American capitalist medicine has produced a national healthcare system that is the most expensive – and producing the worse outcomes for patients – in the world. For many patients, social inequities and racial disparities embedded throughout the US healthcare system have only deepened and intensified over the last two decades, with very few realizing the promises made by medical technological innovation. Healthcare policy makers are turning to ‘data-driven healthcare’ as a solution to these endemic problems. Yet the promise that digital technologies and data analytics will solve some of the most vexing questions in medical science, and will make healthcare more accessible, affordable, and equitable, in fact, hides the ongoing, structural inequities and injustices in health care.