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NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

theguardian.com

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Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#21

Post by escapologybb »

HNSHITSAYS wrote: post #16
Fuxy wrote: post #14

I will be opting out of this thank you very much. I don't like my insurance company knowing my health status. If insurance companies are not willing to take risks their in the wrong business. I want to be able so see who accessed my information so i am able to prove with certainty when a insurance company discriminates against me. Plus the reason they claim they accessed it would be very important when i demonstrate…

>>>"I don't like my insurance company knowing my health status." Are you joking? Insurance companies have/need access to all the data about you, otherwise they won't be able to pay providers for the services. This is equivalent of Tea Party activist proclaiming "Keep government out of my Medicare". These Privacy FUD articles bring out the worst of HN.

I'm not sure if you read the article, but I'll assume you have and you missed the part where this was about the NHS in England.

My healthcare when I turn up to hospital in the UK isn't being paid for by an insurance company, it is - basically - funded through taxes and administered through central government.

Hope that clears it up for you.

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#22

Post by lclarkmichalek »

exDM69 wrote: post #13
nodata wrote: post #2

"The extracted information will contain NHS numbers, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender." Yikes! Date of birth AND postcode? Pseudoanonymous that is not.

Even if this data (date of birth, postcode, etc) would be removed, it would still be rather trivial for e.g. an insurance company to match these records to their customers. Given one or two insurance claims for doctor's appointments, matching the medical records for identical dates is enough to pinpoint a person with adequate certainty. Then the insurance company can grep the records for mentions of smoking, drinking…

Do people regularly claim on insurance for NHS doctor's appointments? I know I never have. Regarding the smoking etc, I'm pretty sure that health insurance companies ask if you smoke (and yes, double the cost if you say yes), and giving a lying counts as insurance fraud. Due to that, I'm not too sure how relevant the NHS records would be, other than in cases where someone has lied, in which case I'm not too inclined to feel sorry for them.

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#24

Post by ig1 »

Fuxy wrote: post #14

I will be opting out of this thank you very much. I don't like my insurance company knowing my health status. If insurance companies are not willing to take risks their in the wrong business. I want to be able so see who accessed my information so i am able to prove with certainty when a insurance company discriminates against me. Plus the reason they claim they accessed it would be very important when i demonstrate…

FYI. If your insurance company requires you to disclose pre-existing conditions and you fail to do so, it will give legitimate grounds for the insurance company to cancel your insurance if you ever make a claim in the future.

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#25

Post by arethuza »

exDM69 wrote: post #13
nodata wrote: post #2

"The extracted information will contain NHS numbers, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender." Yikes! Date of birth AND postcode? Pseudoanonymous that is not.

Even if this data (date of birth, postcode, etc) would be removed, it would still be rather trivial for e.g. an insurance company to match these records to their customers. Given one or two insurance claims for doctor's appointments, matching the medical records for identical dates is enough to pinpoint a person with adequate certainty. Then the insurance company can grep the records for mentions of smoking, drinking…

"Given one or two insurance claims for doctor's appointments"

You don't make any kind of insurance claim for visiting a GP (or indeed any other NHS service that I know of). You do make an insurance claim if you have private health insurance in addition to NHS cover but that's optional and entirely separate and that's for visiting a private hospital (although the same senior doctors often work at both NHS and private hospitals).

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#26

Post by jamessb »

The care.data program was also the subject of an editorial in this week's issue of Nature [0]

Ross Anderson has a blog post with links to more details [1], including a PDF of how the patient information leaflet 'should really have been drafted' [2] (quite different to how it was - [3]).

[0] http://www.nature.com/news/power-to-the-people-1.14505

[1] http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2014/01/08/opting-out-of-...

[2] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/caredata_trifold.pdf

[3] http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/records/healthrecords/Do...

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#27

Post by arethuza »

HNSHITSAYS wrote: post #16
Fuxy wrote: post #14

I will be opting out of this thank you very much. I don't like my insurance company knowing my health status. If insurance companies are not willing to take risks their in the wrong business. I want to be able so see who accessed my information so i am able to prove with certainty when a insurance company discriminates against me. Plus the reason they claim they accessed it would be very important when i demonstrate…

>>>"I don't like my insurance company knowing my health status." Are you joking? Insurance companies have/need access to all the data about you, otherwise they won't be able to pay providers for the services. This is equivalent of Tea Party activist proclaiming "Keep government out of my Medicare". These Privacy FUD articles bring out the worst of HN.

I'm amazed that someone signed up for HN to make this comment.

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#28

Post by hobbes300 »

ealexhudson wrote: post #12

This is mostly a good thing. The NHS is of course a huge trove of valuable information, but there are some incredibly compelling reasons to make it available to anyone who can improve patient care - start-ups should be interested in this too.

Except several people have shown how to de-anonomyse the data.

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#29

Post by ealexhudson »

ig1 wrote: post #23

It's unclear why they didn't get the UK Data Service to handle this, who have extensive experience in anonymization and data control (they handle the processing of census data and HMRC tax information by external researchers among other things).

The data gets held in N3 which is an entirely separate system/network, and has a much higher set of standards than UKDS would largely be used to using. HSCIC are well used to doing this as well.

Re: NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

#30

Post by xerophtye »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #22
exDM69 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if this data (date of birth, postcode, etc) would be removed, it would still be rather trivial for e.g. an insurance company to match these records to their customers. Given one or two insurance claims for doctor's appointments, matching the medical records for identical dates is enough to pinpoint a person with adequate certainty. Then the insurance company can grep the records for mentions of smoking, drinking…

Do people regularly claim on insurance for NHS doctor's appointments? I know I never have. Regarding the smoking etc, I'm pretty sure that health insurance companies ask if you smoke (and yes, double the cost if you say yes), and giving a lying counts as insurance fraud. Due to that, I'm not too sure how relevant the NHS records would be, other than in cases where someone has lied, in which case I'm not too inclined…

Exactly. If you are trying to hide such information from insurance companies that would help them better understand your risks, that is unfair to insurance companies. That is Insurance fraud.
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