NHS Advocates Selling Confidential Patient Data For Secondary Purposes

Latest plans announced by the UK's Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) have resulted in a flurry of media controversy condemning NHS England (NHS) for advocating the sale of patient data to third parties for profitable gain.

HSCIC, together with the NHS, has pioneered a new scheme, known as the 'care.data'. From March 2014, patient data from GP practices will be extracted, anonymised and aggregated in a central database for sale to third parties such as drug and insurance companies. Such data will include information about every hospital admission since 1980, family history, vaccination records, medical diagnoses, referrals, health metrics such as BMI and blood pressure, as well as all NHS prescriptions. This information will be combined with other confidential patient data, such as date of birth, postcode, gender, and NHS number, to allow the NHS to assess patient care. The NHS then intends to sell such pseudonymised information to any organisation which can meet certain questionable criteria for conditions of release. These include broad circumstances such as for health intelligence, health improvement, audit, health service research and service planning. Critics have condemned such moves as highly controversial, considering that most patients believe any information shared with their GPs is given in the strictest confidence; yet this will be shared automatically as part of the care.data scheme unless patients explicitly opt-out.

The British Medical Associations supports the initiative, which advocates the secondary use of patient data. Interestingly, the scheme has also received approval from the ICO, on the grounds that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 permits the NHS to extract patient data under the care.data scheme, which...