SUMMARY:

Even if your data plans are as noble and necessary as they come, a failure to earn buy-in will leave you facing significant opposition.

It’s one of the great questions of our times: if you have loads of interesting data that can be used for the benefit of all, how does that square up against people’s desire, or indeed right, to maintain control over their own information? I suspect there are many such debates on the horizon, but for now you’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect case study than that of England’s National Health Service (NHS) and the data it holds on its patients.

This is a highly politicized mess, as the British government is gradually privatizing the NHS, but the key facts stand above that particular fray.

Let’s see what happens in the cloud…

Over the last 15 years or so, the NHS has become increasingly computerized, and it is now at the point where data about hospital and general practitioner visits will soon all be accessible from the same place, namely an archive for so-called Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) that used to be only for inpatient data.

With this centralization comes the enhanced ability to find patterns, track trends and generally improve the NHS’s ability to do what it does. The English NHS’s central data organization, the Information Center for Health and Social Care (HSCIC), sold the HES dataset to consulting firm PA Consulting, to see what magic could be squeezed out of people’s medical records.

A couple years back, PA produced a report in which it talked about how it experimented with handling all this data. Fast forward to yesterday, and someone pointed out certain details of this report to doctor and member of parliament Sarah Wollaston on Twitter. She wasn’t happy, and it became a big story.