Startups in stealth mode are a common enough phenomenon in the Bay Area where so many believe they have the next best killer application and would like to keep things on the down-low.
But as transparency and trust become highly significant in healthcare, some prominent health data experts appear to be not taking too kindly to companies in stealth mode.
Take for instance Atul Butte, chief data scientist at University of California Health that comprises six health systems, five of which are academic medical centers. On Wednesday, Butte was moderating a fireside chat with Cora Han, who is UC Health’s chief health data officer, at the Precision Medicine World Conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The two were discussing the concerns that have spilled into the public consciousness over Google Health’s data agreement with Ascension Health among other news stories probing the confluence of artificial intelligence tools and patient care.
Both settled on the fact that transparency is key to building trust — something that is imperative today not just between health systems and the companies they work with but more importantly between patients/people and health systems.
“I want to make it really clear that in healthcare, trust means everything for us and the public,” Butte told the audience. “That is our brand. UCSF has been in business for 154 years for a reason. People trust a brand here. We’d rather not do a deal with a nontrustworthy partner than tarnish the brand.”
In this context, he shared an anecdote about a company with an AI product that was looking to work with a health system.
[They were] looking for a pilot partner – a health system and they were still in stealth mode.
Companies are in stealth mode all the time in the area and this company was asking for a referral in our system to the right person that could evaluate [the tech].
And I had to mention to the company [that] I refuse to send that company anywhere in our hierarchy because they are in stealth mode. If I couldn’t point them to a website, if I couldn’t even document any principals at this point, how was I going to defend any introduction at all? It’s going to be hard for some of these companies. Stealth mode is really not really a good idea when you are trying to promote a company inside our system when we are trying to work on that transparency.
Earlier, in response to a question by Butte, Han noted that the general public is keen to share data but might have adverse reactions if the data being used is shared in a way that they did not expect. She said that as tech companies contemplate partnerships with health systems, they need to think about a few things to build trust. The very first is transparency and being honest to one another. But there is the very important matter of security.
“This data is very sensitive,” Han said. It is important to take care of it and be thinking about limiting access to data and what are your network controls and making sure that all your data security elements are there….Finally… there is data stewardship. It encompasses things like making sure you think about data integrity, making sure you think about accountability within the organizations. These are all things that are part of being transparent.
Photo: taa22, Getty Images
