BigHealth IT’s Christmas in the UK has been delayed for a few months, as the July 1st date for releasing every GP patient’s records to third parties has been delayed.
Don’t worry though, it will still be an early Christmas: September 1st.
Here’s the key quote from the CEO of the NHS:
“Data saves lives and has huge potential to rapidly improve care and outcomes, as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown….We are absolutely determined to take people with us on this mission. We take our responsibility to safeguard the data we hold incredibly seriously.”
Simon Bolten
My two biggest concerns? First and foremost, every patient has been defaulted to an Opt-In. Why? Because they know that if it was a default Opt-Out, then very few patients would Opt-In to be data-mined. In other words, they know what they are doing is wrong.
Second, this a continued drift from the patient as a human to the patient as a data set. It is necessarily dehumanizing, and, as I have discussed before, deontologically unethical. (The NHS is treating patients as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. See my post: Healthcare AI, Kant’s Deontology, and My Cat)
Anyway, unless some spontaneous, deep political movement develops to change this data-harvesting to an Opt-In program ( highly unlikely—bordering on fantasy—and which would be fought tooth and nail by corporate interests), the movement towards patients-as-data-sources, simply to be mined, is inevitable.
And for those of us in the USA looking across the Atlantic at what’s happening in the UK?
I wouldn’t feel too smug. I recently watched a video where one healthcare company was creating products from an EHR dataset of 60 million patients! In the USA, it’s already Christmas everyday for BigHealth IT.