i4Health Attempted To Access All Of UK's Patient Records

An information firm associated with several pharmaceutical companies attempted to sign an agreement that would have given them direct access to the UK’s new medical database. The new database carries all of the medical information for every patient in the country. i4Health attempted to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the government’s Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC).

The UK’s medical database has been criticized by proponents of privacy. Some industry experts believe that the medical data will ultimately be used to identify individual patients. There is also concern that medical information, even if non-identifying, will be sold to third parties, namely pharmaceutical companies. Ian Herbert, who works for the British Computer Society, said that the new database will definitely affect patients and doctors. “Patient surveys show that the public get most upset when their records are used by commercial outfits for selling or marketing products. Many clinicians will not be happy about this too,” Herbert said. “You have to keep the data pretty lean if you are going to keep the risk of identification at an insignificant level. Once you start accessing it over time and comparing it with other datasets it quickly becomes quite a rich source of information. Then you can identify patients. That's the risk with big industries like pharma which have a lot of data.”

Drug companies have stated that they don’t believe there is any risk of individual patients being identified. i4Health’s CEO, Lawrence Berry, claims that all data will be anonymous. “Companies such as ours use anonymized data, not identifiable confidential data, to look for where improvements can be made to improve treatments and outcomes for patients,” Berry said.