Each year we divide our masters of public policy students into teams and get them to write case studies of public policy failures. The winning team this year wrote a case study of the care.data fiasco. The UK government collected personal health information on tens of millions of people who had had hospital treatment in … Continue reading Award-winning case history of the care.data health privacy scandal
Today’s newspapers report that the cladding on the Grenfell Tower, which appears to have been a major factor in the dreadful loss of life there, was banned in Germany and permitted in America only for low-rise buildings. It would have cost only £2 more per square meter to use fire-resistant cladding instead. The tactical way … Continue reading Regulatory capture
Now that everyone’s distracted with the supreme court case on Brexit, you can expect the government to sneak out something it’s ashamed of. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has decided to ignore the wishes of over a million people who opted out of having their hospital records given to third parties such as drug companies, and … Continue reading Government U-turn on Health Privacy
On Monday May 4th, the Dutch medical privacy campaigner Guido van’t Noordende will visit us in Cambridge. OK, it’s a bank holiday, but that’s the only day he’ll be in town. His talk will be on The Dutch electronic patient record system and beyond – towards physician-controlled decentralized medical record exchange. Four years ago, Guido … Continue reading Medical privacy seminar on May 4th
Today sees the publication of a report I helped to write for the Nuffield Bioethics Council on what happens to medical ethics in a world of cloud-based medical records and pervasive genomics. As the information we gave to our doctors in private to help them treat us is now collected and treated as an industrial … Continue reading Can we have medical privacy, cloud computing and genomics all at the same time?
I have written a letter to Stephen Dorrell, the chair of the Health Committee, to point out how officials appear to have misled his committee when they gave evidence there on Tuesday. It is very welcome that the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, announced he will change the law to ban the sale of our medical … Continue reading Health privacy: not fixed yet
On January 23rd we had a conference call with the NHS Information Centre and a couple of its software suppliers about anonymisation. LBT readers will have followed how your GP records are to uploaded to the new central database care.data for resale unless you opt out. Any previous opt outs from other central systems like … Continue reading NHS opt out: not what it seems