This week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock launched a report with the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), calling for increased automation of NHS services through partnerships with private sector technology companies. The pairing is highly questionable in itself – the (misnamed) Taxpayers’ Alliance is a right-wing lobby group backed by big business, which seeks to drastically reduce the role of the state and has previously called for replacing the NHS with an “insurance-based model” of healthcare.
But that’s not all that should concern us. The report is just the latest in a string of moves by the Health Secretary to open up hugely valuable, publicly-held NHS datasets to the private sector. Vast amounts of private NHS data have been transferred to private firms, under the auspices of recent public-private partnerships to develop artificial intelligence and other data-driven technologies for the NHS. Some of them are highlighted in the TPA report itself. One such example is the partnership between the Royal Free NHS Trust in London and DeepMind, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Announced in 2016, the agreement provided DeepMind with access to 1.6 million patients’ medical records, which it would use to develop and launch its new healthcare app, Streams. Although the way DeepMind handles NHS data has changed since the Information Commissioner’s Office deemed the agreement to have breached the Data Protection Act, the company has continued to develop and scale the app at further NHS Trusts across the country.
Big promises…
In the case of DeepMind, the company has stated that the app could help save lives lost each year by enabling doctors to identify life-threatening illnesses like sepsis more quickly. These sorts of big claims made at a relatively early stage in product development are fairly common in the private medtech sector, partly due to its reliance on venture capital and the associated demands for promises of high returns on investment.
