Sharing NHS Data Saves Lives

Governments increasingly promote digital health records to ensure better tracking of individual patients and public health trends. A dilemma has emerged about who controls such data: Some argue that healthcare funded by taxpayers should be subject to review; others focus on patient privacy. Writing for the Telegraph, physician Jeremy Farrar explains how children are rarely used in randomized clinical trials for testing new drugs: “By collating information about drugs and outcomes from the medical records of several million children, it is now possible to find answers that would otherwise elude us.” He opposes a proposed European Union data-protection regulation, arguing it would impede research, adding that in Britain, information from patient records – with identifiers typically stripped – is available to “researchers in our universities and the pharmaceutical industry.” Farrar says he has no objections to sharing his information with an opt-out system. Patients with psychiatric disorders, contagious diseases or other medical conditions who fear cyber-hacking or bias may disagree. Many consumers have doubts whether digital medical records can be kept secure. – YaleGlobal