Digital Healthcare – For patient or Profit?
I read this article with interest and despair.
Healthcare as a money-spinner does not sit well with me as someone who has both benefited from and worked within the UK NHS for almost 15 years. I am not naive enough to think that a significant proportion of innovation in healthcare isn’t driven by profit. However, I do wonder whether in the drive towards digital innovation we are perfectly packaging huge amounts of data which are ripe for the picking in the private/ business sector. Digital professionalism at an individual level is crucial for our own development and our individual departments. Is the same expected at higher levels? Who are the guardians of our data and how easily may the system be exploited by those who wish to financially gain from our efforts to innovate in the name of patient safety?
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A great provocation, Lynsey! I share your unease, but then there are many who think this is a necessary way to go. It would be great to hear from others who feel more positive about the intersection of commercial and healthcare interests.
I wholeheartedly agree with your reservations here.
It is, I think, good practice to always ask – who owns the data, who looks after it, and who do they allow to see/use it. Now that we are unshackled from the GDPR, it enables the data from, say, track and trace systems – esp. those built outwit the NHS by private contractors – to share that data with whoever they deem to have ‘legitimate interest’.
This has been growing for quite some time – yet we remain in that dark period where technical innovation is still in front, and regulation is still in the process of catching up.