Our Bodies, Our Data by Adam Tanner Summary

Our Bodies, Our Data exposes the multi-billion-dollar trade in anonymized medical records, prescriptions, and insurance claims sold by data brokers to pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and marketers. Adam Tanner investigates how this hidden industry prioritizes profit over patient privacy, highlighting risks of re-identification and the lack of comprehensive health records for actual care.

This book is essential for healthcare professionals, policymakers, privacy advocates, and anyone concerned about data ethics. It offers critical insights for patients seeking to understand how their medical information is commercialized without consent.

Yes—Tanner’s investigative rigor and clear storytelling make it a landmark work on medical privacy. It sheds light on systemic exploitation in healthcare data markets, offering a compelling case for regulatory reform.

Hospitals, pharmacies, and insurers sell anonymized records to data brokers like IMS Health (now IQVIA), which aggregate billions of patient profiles. These dossiers—stripped of names but retaining identifiers like birth year and doctor details—are monetized for drug marketing and research.

Advanced algorithms can cross-reference anonymized data with public records to reveal identities, exposing patients to discrimination, insurance denial, or employment issues. Tanner warns that purported “anonymization” often fails to protect privacy.

Tanner argues that while corporations profit from patient data, individuals struggle to access unified health records. This paradox undermines care quality while enabling unchecked commercial exploitation.

The book advocates for patient ownership of health data, transparency in data sales, and stricter regulations akin to European GDPR. Tanner emphasizes empowering individuals to control how their information is shared.

While What Stays in Vegas explores broader data commercialization, Our Bodies, Our Data focuses specifically on healthcare. Both reveal systemic privacy failures, but the latter highlights life-and-death implications of medical data misuse.

Some critics note the technical complexity of data anonymization topics, which may challenge casual readers. However, the book is widely praised for its rigor and urgency in addressing underreported privacy violations.

With AI accelerating data analysis, re-identification risks have grown since the book’s publication. Its warnings remain critical as healthcare AI and personalized medicine expand reliance on patient data.

Tanner details how brokers like IQVIA and Symphony Health operate as middlemen, compiling dossiers on 500+ million patients globally. These firms prioritize pharmaceutical marketing over scientific research, per internal industry documents.

The book critiques the tension between data’s potential for medical advancement and its misuse for profit. Tanner calls for ethical guidelines to ensure patient consent and equitable benefits from data use.