Tim Kelsey, the NHS’s man for all things data and digital, has had it in the neck a lot recently. Could this be why he is off to Australia to work for telecommunications giant, Telstra (more on them below)?
As the driving force behind the expensive, error-strewn care.data programme, Kelsey was always going to be a controversial figure. People are rightly concerned that this vast database of all our medical records, which was sold as benefitting the health service, would also be of huge commercial value to pharmaceutical companies, private health insurers and others.
A 2014 paper by Kelsey’s old employer McKinsey adds weight to the idea that the intention was always to commercialise our data. The paper reveals that one of the ambitions for care.data is to create “Product lines of data insight available to “customers’”. “Is there a product and a matching customer,” it asks, and “what are they interested in knowing?”
