Patient data might be the biggest business you’ve never heard of.
As a STAT investigation published Monday revealed, data brokers are quietly trafficking in Americans’ health information — often without their knowledge or consent, and beyond the reach of federal health privacy laws. This market in medical records has become highly lucrative — $13.5 billion annually — thanks to advances in artificial intelligence that enable the slicing, dicing, and cross-referencing of that data in powerful new ways.