The UK government’s new plan to foster innovation through artificial intelligence (AI) is ambitious. Its goals rely on the better use of public data, including renewed efforts to maximise the value of health data held by the NHS. Yet this could involve the use of real data from patients using the NHS. This has been highly controversial in the past and previous attempts to use this health data have been at times close to disastrous.
Patient data would be anonymised, but concerns remain about potential threats to this anonymity. For example, the use of health data has been accompanied by worries about access to data for commercial gain. The care.data programme, which collapsed in 2014, had an similar underlying idea: sharing health data across the country to both publicly funded research bodies and private companies.
