Patients are "misled" over confidentiality of health e-records
Researchers from Oxford University say that patients are not being adequately informed about possible secondary uses of their medical data for research and are "misled about the level of anonymisation of their data and the likelihood of re-identification"
The criticism is in a paper "The limits of anonymisation in NHS data systems" which was published yesterday by the British Medical Journal [2 February 2011]. The paper brings to the fore arguments over whether a patient's health data can remain confidential in an era of data collection and sharing, and what the paper calls the "increasing commercialisation of patient data".
Some researchers argue that it is easier to find out what treatments and drugs work, or don't tend to work, if the identity of the patient is known; and that genuinely anonymous data, as well as informed consent, would jeopardise the integrity of research and audit, which would hinder the progress of medical knowledge and could lead to incorrect conclusions.
