Extract from Health and
Social Care Questions
(Havant) (Con): What
progress his Department is making on implementing the
Government's Life Sciences Industrial Strategy.
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Mr
Jeremy Hunt): The UK has a fantastic life sciences
industry. As a result of the sector deal announced in December, a
further £210 million is being invested in research and £162
million in medical manufacturing.
: Patient outcomes can be
improved by sharing big datasets and integrating new
technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, across the NHS.
Will my right hon. Friend update the House on the NHS’s plans to
digitise and adapt to the fourth industrial revolution?
Mr Hunt: I am looking forward to reading my hon.
Friend’s report into this topic in May. We are a bit of a
curate’s egg in this country. We have five of the world’s top 10
medical research universities and more than double the number of
Nobel prizes of France, so we do incredibly well on the research
side, but some of our hospitals are still running on paper, which
is totally inappropriate. That is why we are determined to
implement the Wachter review.
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Extracts from committee
stage (Commons) of the Data Protection Bill
The Minister of State, Department for Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport (Margot James):...We agree that
the NHS is a prime state asset, and that its rich patient data
records have great potential to further medical research. Its
data could be used to train systems using Artificial Intelligence to diagnose
patients’ conditions, to manage risk, to target services and to
take pre-emptive and preventive action—all developments with huge
potential. I have discussed this matter with ministerial
colleagues; not only do we want to see these technological
developments, but we want the NHS, if it is to make any such
deals, to make fair deals. The benefits of such arrangements are
often not exclusively monetary...
(Bristol North West)
(Lab):...Both those scenarios raise a policy question
about the end of the process, when it comes back to the
individual—the information has been personally identifiable, then
is pseudonymised in a pooled way, and is then re-identified. Will
those issues give rise to an offence under the part of the Bill
that we are considering, and should consent be different, with
the potential for pseudonymised data to be re-identified made
clear to the end user? The reason I have not tabled any
amendments to deal with the point is that I do not know the
answer, but I should welcome the Minister’s views, and perhaps a
commitment to have a conversation either with the Information
Commissioner or the new data and Artificial Intelligence ethics
unit about different types of consent where data is pseudonymised
and then re-identified, either for health purposes or targeted
advertising...
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SIXTH SITTING
