Selling NHS patient data

The NHS is in crisis.1 Resolving it is a major focus of the forthcoming general election, and several high profile publications have recently set out recommendations for the next government. The recommendation from former party leaders Tony Blair and William Hague that NHS data should be harnessed for commercial purposes has garnered considerable attention. They propose establishing an NHS data trust as a public-private company to facilitate use of NHS data for both public health research and commercially successful artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.2 This has been widely, and correctly, interpreted as a recommendation to sell NHS data to fuel a cost cutting and efficiency boosting AI revolution.34

The recommendation itself avoids using the word “sell.” Yet the discussion in the full report, published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, makes the “selling” interpretation unavoidable. The BBC is used as an exemplar of a public organisation …