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Imagine a world in which hospitals go public, or patients can access Consumer Reports ratings on hospitals based on survivor rates. “If you are given a choice among three health insurance plans, one of which enables you to live longer, you’d probably be willing to pay $50 more a month for that higher level of care. It’s crazy that consumers get more choices when choosing restaurants or movies than they do with healthcare,” says Michael Saylor, founder and chairman of “intelligent e-business” company MicroStrategy Inc. Saylor is calling for Medicare and Medicaid databases to be auctioned off for data mining, along with federal data on crime, air travel, weather, and traffic.
MicroStrategy hopes to make a foray into the government realm of data, as its business heads lobby in Washington, D.C., for the creation of a central repository to house the prodigious amounts of data residing in government databases.
“The government, much like a business, needs to understand its business. It needs to perform more efficiently, it needs to build relationships with its customers, and it needs to deliver business over electronic means like the Internet,” says Rob Silverman, head of MicroStrategy’s “e-government” initiative. He believes the government could better use knowledge management to improve productivity and performance, as well as implement customer relationship management (CRM) to enhance customer service. “Unlike private business looking to make a monetary profit, the government agencies will profit from satisfying constituents better,” he explains.
As such applications converge into a single platform, MicroStrategy believes the government will have to look into enterprise business intelligence applications. “We hope to provide the platform to enable the government to harness the power of its vast asset of data, and ultimately, to deliver better value to its customers,” says Saylor, who says he wants his company to become the “General Electric” of the government’s data mining initiatives.
Saylor believes a chain reaction will occur if the government auctions off rights to mine government databases. “Rather than have the information stagnating, we should harness it and sell intelligent medicine back to 100 million people,” says Saylor, who believes the scrutiny associated with an IPO would benefit healthcare. “If a hospital’s stock is worth $200 rather than 50 cents, you will worry about how the public perceives your healthcare. We could see results parsed by hospital, drug, or therapy.”
Saylor is proposing the establishment of a medical exchange commission to regulate formats for creating liquidity and credibility for hospitals. “We want to create a central bank into which millions of people will put ‘medical currency.’ Consumers will access information and withdraw it, much like a bank that loans money or gives you access to money,” says Saylor. “Then, if you were about to go in for triple-bypass surgery or a knee operation, you could mine data and demographics that match your situation and feel more confident in the treatment you select. The payoff of this type of bank could be an average of five extra years of life, or the eradication of a certain disease,” he adds.
Saylor’s plan has its critics. Privacy groups are up in arms over the proposal as concerns over “Big Brother” circulate in a system already overburdened with controversy about poor privacy protocols.
To address concerns by privacy groups, Saylor is attempting to galvanize the government to draft protocols that would protect privacy; “Like the Census, you can just strip the names off and save a life,” he says. Saylor believes, however, that certain privacy advocates have gone overboard. “Why let AT&T install a phone in your house if you know it has the power to listen in on your phone calls? We have to think of the greater good. To eliminate these benefits out of paranoia is ridiculous.”
Furthermore, Saylor says the lobbying won’t stop with medical care, as the possibilities are “endless.” For example, MicroStrategy is working with the Ohio Department of Education to analyze metrics about graduation, teacher accreditation, and attendance rates. The company will devise an “interactive report card” that the public can access according to individual school or district.
“The benefit will be that the Department of Education is delivering more value to its constituents,” says Silverman. “Those schools that don’t do so well on the report card will be policed and driven to improve.”
In addition, MicroStrategy is working on devising a traffic bank. “It could, for instance, inform residents of Northern Virginia of the 10 best alternate routes to the Wilson Bridge during rush hour, eliminating the need for costly bricks and mortar as well as environmental concerns,” says Saylor. He suggests that $3 trillion could be saved over the next five years if his home state were to use data mining techniques to make highways more efficient: “Instead of spending $800 million to turn a 10-lane highway into a 12-lane highway, we could help consumers travel more efficiently during rush hour.”
As a steppingstone toward this vision, the company has launched Strategy.com, through which 100,000 users receive medical information, news, and weather. Saylor expects the number of users to increase to 10 million in the next two years. “Once these millions of people see the endless possibilities, they will lobby government officials about what to do with the data stagnating in their repositories,” he predicts. — Susana Schwartz
Susana Schwartz (schwartec@aol.com) is a freelance writer based in New York.
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