Billing Processes in Personalized Medicine

Abstract

Nowadays, intellectual property such as medical research data is strongly associated with the issue of wanting to protect and share such data for the benefit of research, which prevents disclosure of knowledge. For example, pharmaceutical companies avoid publishing certain parts of their drug discovery research to protect themselves from competitors. As of this writing there are only a limited number of billing systems or market places in the rapidly evolving field of personalized medicine available, where intellectual property, e.g. genome sequencing data, can be traded in exchange for a payment. To contribute, I propose a billing system that can be integrated in an exchange platform for medical data that provides the possibility of receiving payments in exchange for sharing data. Additionally, the system offers the possibility to set fees for specific user groups, which in turn allows to define higher charges for competitors, or let collaborators access certain data for free. In my opinion, exchanging data in this way would benefit both trade partners. As the intellectual property was already gathered, the organizations providing data can use it to collect extra funds. Other institutes buying data can profit by having a larger pool of research data available.