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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

#31

Post by jbrooksuk »

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…

My life insurance quote raised from £15p/m to £45 due to previous depression and my BMI being too low. So yeah, they take it into consideration.

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

#32

Post by russss »

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…

I don't think there are any UK health insurance companies which allow you to claim for NHS doctor's appointments.

Presumably if you have a health insurance plan which covers private doctor's appointments, they get a copy of the doctor's notes anyway.

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

#33

Post by DanBC »

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.

Including the NHS number is bad too.

It's a great shame that the information sharing systems are so bad because all that medical information is potentially very useful.

While anonymising data is hard things like including postcodes and NHS numbers is just stupid.

Don't forget this change is just about GP data, hospital data has been allowed to be shared for a while.

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

#34

Post by michaelt »

russss wrote: post #32
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think there are any UK health insurance companies which allow you to claim for NHS doctor's appointments. Presumably if you have a health insurance plan which covers private doctor's appointments, they get a copy of the doctor's notes anyway.

Several insurance companies will pay a cash incentive to use NHS services rather than claiming on your insurance [1]. For example if you need to stay over night in hospital and choose an NHS hospital instead of a private one they will give you £50 or more per night.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="NHS+cash+benefits"

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

#35

Post by vvvVVVvvv »

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.

I'm not sure what kind of valuable information a start-up would get from this source. Care to explain ?

Thanks.

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

#36

Post by arethuza »

michaelt wrote: post #34
russss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are any UK health insurance companies which allow you to claim for NHS doctor's appointments. Presumably if you have a health insurance plan which covers private doctor's appointments, they get a copy of the doctor's notes anyway.

Several insurance companies will pay a cash incentive to use NHS services rather than claiming on your insurance [1]. For example if you need to stay over night in hospital and choose an NHS hospital instead of a private one they will give you £50 or more per night. [1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="NHS+cash+benefits"

Nice - my employers private health care insurance includes this and I had never noticed!

Mind you I wonder when it would ever apply - if you have a non-emergency then you will choose to go to a private hospital, if it is an emergency then you don't have any option but to go to an NHS hospital...

Maybe for people who are covered by private health care but aren't close enough to a private hospital to actually use it?

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

#37

Post by ig1 »

ealexhudson wrote: post #29
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.

It may be that the Guardian is misreporting it, but from their description the data level is far less anonymized than what I've seen when working with UKDS data.

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

#38

Post by kintamanimatt »

benjamta wrote: post #6

The NHS provide shockingly little information on how to opt out. The leaflet that came through all our doors about this was vague. There is no official form, they just suggest you talk to your surgery. Legislation passed in 2012 allows the NHS to use our data with out first seeking our consent. So that's what I did. Because they don't give this scheme a name, it's hard to talk reception staff about exactly what it is…

And what happens if someone has medical records in the UK but no longer lives there? They'd never receive the notice and not have a UK GP to contact to opt out!

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

#39

Post by Silhouette »

tomp wrote: post #17
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.

In an ideal society, I totally agree. However, in today's world, such data will mostly be exploited by health insurance companies, credit rating agencies, employers, and paparazzi. Unless, of course, the government(s) pass laws that protect the rights of the people and limit the influence of the industry, but that is rather the opposite of what has been happening recently.

It's not so much health insurance companies I'm worried about, as they will probably have access to medical information about their clients anyway, and organisations like BUPA probably do take patient confidentiality seriously.

I'm more concerned about other forms of insurance, and about links to people related to you and not you personally. For example, what if people start getting a higher car insurance quote because someone in their household had an alcohol problem a few years ago? What if parents start getting refused life insurance because someone's sibling died young from an unlucky genetic problem?

Plus there are the obvious concerns if employers or their representatives/trade bodies can get hold of this kind of data and discriminate in dubious ways when making hiring decisions (sorry, we don't hire anyone who ever had a drug problem, even if they've been clean for a decade), media people going after celebrities/politicians/crime victims (that rape victim was obviously a slut, look at the two STIs she's had in the past five years), and so on.

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

#40

Post by sleepyK »

Well, just one more step forward in Britain's unrelenting stride towards becoming a total surveillance state. :/

Once the data is commercially available, it'll be sure to lead to even more targeted marketing, and discrimination by insurance firms.

Edit (couldn't resist :P)

England Prevails!

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