Does This Show Us Just Where The ADHA And Its Late CEO Were Heading?

This appeared last week in the UK.

NHS bosses meet with tech giants to discuss commercial patient database

Key players from the NHS, big tech and pharma have held meetings to discuss how to commercialise tens of millions of medical records culled from a massive new proposed national patient record database.

Andrea Downey – 12 December, 2019

Papers from the meeting organised by the Office of Life Sciences estimate the NHS patient data could be valued at up to £10 billion a year.

NHS England chairman, Lord David Prior, chief executive Simon Stevens and NHSX chief executive, Matthew Gould, met with big tech and pharmaceutical companies to discuss potential uses for patients’ personal records.

Documents revealed plans for a “single, standardised, event-based, longitudinal patient record” containing the data of 65 million patients, pulled together from GPs, hospitals, mental health professionals, demographics registers, prescription records as well as information from the private health sector.

The information would not only be used to serve the NHS, it could be used to provide companies and researchers real-time access to medical data.

Commercial models discussed ranged from the NHS receiving no fees but instead “receiving a curated dataset” through to a royalty fee and shared ownership or products based on NHS data.

Under the proposed free commercial model set out in the papers, the NHS would essentially give away access to all patient data to other parties for no financial return, “the NHS does not receive a direct return but benefits indirectly through increased/better innovation in the wider healthcare system”, the documents state.

In another of the proposed commercial models the NHS would get paid a fee for handing over patient data and then be “be eligible for a discount on any product developed from the collaboration”.

NHS Improvement chair, Baroness Dido Harding, NHS Digital chief executive, Sarah Wilkinson, and chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, Dr David Rosser, were also in attendance, according to documents first reported by The Register and now obtained by Digital Health News.

Alongside NHS players were key industry figures including Amazon UK boss and British Heart Foundation chairman Doug Gurr, Microsoft UK CEO Cindy Rose, joint chief executive of System C Healthcare, Markus Bolton, and Dr Jim Weatherall, vice president for data science and AI for pharma giant AstraZeneca.

The confidential ‘NHS England Health and Care Data Day’, held on October 24, saw discussions around collecting patient data to improve healthcare services, how to fund the data-management project and potentially share profits from it.

Lots more here:

https://www.digitalhealth.net/2019/12/nhs-bosses-meet-with-tech-giants-to-discuss-commercial-patient-database/

Well I never. Having got all the citizens essentially signed up with opt-out, before such a plan can be executed there need to be a few things happen.

First the usage of the #myHealthRecord needs to be dramatically more widely used.

Second the quality of the data held in the record needs to improved.

Third there needs to be a dramatic transformation of the whole record to fit this description of a “single, standardised, event-based, longitudinal patient record”. Major replatforming and investment any one, to enable sensible use of the record contents?

If this is to all play out as the DOH / ADHA hopes, expect lots more pressure / incentives for doctors, more marketing, and some not very public arrangements with data mining and health insurance companies.

You can’t imagine that before he leaves Mr Kelsey would not brief the ADHA Board / DOH on what his mates are doing in the UK and what they expect from it.

I think we are at a tipping point. Either major investment in the present obsolete #myHealthRecord will be needed and happen under a new data focussed CEO or the record will just slowly fade away.

Which fate is your money on – accepting the #myHealthRecord is fundamentally irrelevant to daily clinical care? Go for broke or fade away – it really seems the status quo is just a terrible waste of money – so I suspect it will be one of the other!

David.