That is technically correct, the best kind of correct!

Except any department in any hospital or insurer that welcomes you to do research can make that de-identified data available to you with a simple contract.

How do you think college freshmen get in the door to work on research with physicians?

No, it’s not public, but it’s trivially accessible.

It's not trivially accessible. It's not impossible, but far from trivial. Startups like Tempus are doing it but I doubt it's trivial for just any startup to get that data

If I hadn’t worked in precisely that field and seen how easily we gave out data sharing agreements to partners, ...

But I did. No, I use the word “trivial” knowingly.

To partners, sure. What sort of partners ? If I start a company and show up at the door, would they just give me the datasets ? Would those data sets be in useful formats ? if you are seriously telling me those data sets are easy to get, let's talk because I know what to do with them.

There’s usually a spot in every insurance company that considers itself the “innovation center.” Basically, if you incur no costs to them beyond getting you the data, and give them a free trial run on your product, you’ll get your data-sharing agreement.

The data for insurers is in the form of Billings (which come with Diagnosis codes!), which follows a federally-standardized format (check out the Medicare website) and you can get a sample of 5% of Medicare subscribers’ data off the Medicare site without any hoops to jump through.

I want to say, “if you actually know what to do with it, PM me and we can talk details,” but the fact that you don’t already know about this sort of low-hanging fruit suggests you’re from outside the hc sector looking in.

I am from outside the hc sector, but I know how to build models on large data sets. So if you seriously know how to get the data, I seriously know what to do with it.

j s at self driving medicine dot com

Reach out, we can talk about what you’re thinking.