A campaign group acting on behalf of doctors and patients has threatened legal action over NHS England’s procurement of a £480m ($582m) ‘Union Data Platform’.
Lawyers representing The Doctors’ Association UK, the National Pensioners’ Convention and Just Treatment said the plans for the platform, currently listed in the tender documents, could lead to fitness apps sold by tech giants such as Amazon and Google. I also question whether it will lead to creating. Returning to the NHS for the ‘public interest’.
In another development News outlet openDemocracy has revealed that hundreds of NHS hospitals have been ordered to share sensitive medical records of their patients with Palantir. — U.S. spytech firm that sees FDP as a “must-win” contract — under the scheme of “Faster data flow”.
of formal procurement FDP started in January. since then, Campaign group suggests legal action may be taken Extending Palantir’s work on Covid-19 data stores and Faster Data Flows.
In pre-litigation legal letters seen by register Lawyers acting on behalf of the campaign group this week gave NHS England (a non-sectoral public body operating under the Department of Health and Human Services) two weeks to respond before applying for judicial review. rice field.
Campaigners challenge the NHS England’s failure to publish a data protection impact assessment of the FDP’s ‘transformative’ plans. Noting that health data is a “special category” of personal data allowed under the European Convention on Human Rights, the lawyer has asked the agency to confirm that he will release the DPIA within two weeks. increase.
Also contested is the right of the public to opt out of having their data shared on the system. NHS England has said the data will be anonymized or pseudonymized. This is a process that removes an individual’s identifiers from the data but leaves the possibility of re-identifying the individual at a later date via certain markers.
A legal challenge points out that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has already said that pseudonymized data still counts as personal data and that consent is required before sharing. It questions whether the current NHS data opt-out scheme is suitable for the FDP, as it was designed before the data platform was planned.
The letter, endorsed by tech justice activist Foxglove, also challenges the way FDP “owners” approve “research projects” in the “public interest.” It cites NHS England’s own documents, claiming it sidesteps the need for approval from an independent body. review board.
“As a specific example, under the FDP, Google or Amazon will have access to data ‘owned’ by NHS England for the purpose of developing fitness watches that NHS England claims are in the ‘public interest’. They believe it will improve the fitness of the general public, or at least that of the general public who can afford to buy a fitness watch.
register We have contacted NHS England and offered them the opportunity to respond.
Dr David Nichol, a consultant neurologist and representative of the British Medical Association, said in a statement: “The history of the NHS is littered with costly IT disasters and we are now facing the worst workforce crisis we have ever faced. We can’t afford another disaster in the midst of this.There is too much we don’t know about the NHS Federated Data Platform to be sure that doctors will help their patients or that it will work as promised. increase.”
He said £480m is a very high stake for a project that the public and medical professionals know little about. “We are now submitting these urgent questions to the government and, unfortunately, we stand ready to seek answers if they continue to thwart us.”
