The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) has publisehed a draft data strategy for the NHS.
It said it will involve new rights for patients to access their data and should support the development of new technologies for healthcare.
It emphasised the potential to promote innovation in areas such as robotic process automation and said the strategy will support the regulation of artificial intelligence.
DHSC also highlighted the importance of data in the NHS response to the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming it has saved over a million lives.
Matthew Gould (pictured), chief executive of NHSX, said: “Data saves lives, and has saved thousands of lives in the past year. Safe access to a patient’s data allows a doctor to make the right diagnosis and offer patients the right treatment. Safe access to aggregated data driven research into new treatments like dexamethasone for Covid-19, which has now saved over a million lives.
“The new data strategy will set out our vision to go further, to learn from the pandemic, to save more lives with data, to use technology to ensure patient privacy is even better protected, and to give patients more control of their health records.”
Full details are becoming available Tuesday morning. Further story to follow.
Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
