“The worst possible thing we could do is give data away to a company that doesn’t pay tax in the UK, finds a cure for dementia, then decides to sell it to us at a price we can’t afford,” says Annemarie Naylor, ex-director of policy and strategy at Future Care Capital (FCC), a charitable health and social care think tank.
The NHS holds 55 million primary care records and 23 million secondary and tertiary care records along with many other scientific and medical datasets. John Bell, the Oxford University professor who leads the government’s Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, has said that the innovations possible from using this data are “mammoth” and will “change medicine forever”.
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