(This kind of thing happens all the time.) A doctor is trying to judge how risky your operation is, to decide if you can go to a health centre, where you might be seen sooner and released quicker, or must be sent to a hospital.īecause your health data is held in many places – at your GP and across various hospitals where you have been – there is not one complete picture of you as a patient they can use to check. At various times you have seen your GP, and been to a hospital in south London, but the surgery is due to be carried out in a different borough. Imagine you have had knee pain for years. At the moment, caregivers in one part of the NHS often can’t access the records of care their patients received elsewhere. There is clearly a need to make patient data more consistent and accessible across the NHS. The government is seeking to overhaul the way it handles every health record in England, and its plans have filled some healthcare workers with alarm. It is particularly valuable to tech giants, who would like to get their hands on NHS datasets to build AI machine-learning systems.Īs things stand today, I believe my local GP would safeguard the record of my abortion. Ernst & Young has valued NHS patient data at £9.6bn a year. Many see in that data a source of immense potential – and profit. The NHS may hold the richest set of population-wide, machine-readable health data in the world. For decades the government has required GPs to store patients’ records in a standardised way: as well as longhand notes, every interaction with a GP is saved on a computer database in a simple, consistent code. This work has exposed me to worrying details about how our medical data can be used, including the Home Office practice of tracking migrants using their health records.
#DATA GUARDIAN WINDOWS SERIES#
In a series of cases about NHS data since the start of the pandemic, we have defended people’s right to a say about who sees their medical information.
I’ve joined clinical studies in the past.īut I also help run a legal campaign group, Foxglove, that takes action against the government and tech companies when they infringe people’s rights. My Texan parents, both scientists, taught me that sharing information with organisations like the NHS can help it plan services and research ways to improve care.
It’s not just that a complete health record helps my GP treat me.
There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with this question, and a lot that’s right.
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