AN ETHICAL ANALYSIS OF MEDICAL DATA MINING: AN ARGUMENT FOR BUSINESS RESTRAINT IN THE FACE OF AGGRESSIVE DATA MINING PRACTICES

A Federal mandate requiring healthcare providers to adopt and demonstrate "meaningful use " of electronic healthcare records creates the specter of a comprehensive national medical record database. Digitizing health records and utilizing such records for medical data mining purposes presents potential benefits to patients and society, but also creates opportunities to invade patient privacy. Thus, it is necessary to better understand data mining in the context of the healthcare environment for both business and public policy reasons. This paper presents a brief review of medical data mining, revealing potential benefits, costs, and ethical issues. We contribute to the literature by comparing proper and improper medical data mining to aid in the development of a model that can be utilized to determine ethical boundaries. We argue that medical data mining can be done in an ethical manner, aiding in patient care while minimizing privacy risks. We further assert, after a careful ethical analysis using multiple ethical perspectives, that aggressive data mining is unethical, bad business practice, and should be avoided. Several suggestions for the ethical mining and sharing of medical data are discussed, including a scheme classifying the intent of the use of the data and an initial framework to guide ethical mining of medical data.