Although that is a valid concern, we can have nationalized health-care without the government sending data elsewhere.

Those two aren't inclusive of each other.

True, but when the data is in private hands, the government sets regulations, like HIPAA here in the US, to regulate those companies' actions. Meanwhile, the government can and often does do what it wants with what it has.

> The government

In this case the government would be the Department of Health. They've had no involvement with this.

"The NHS" would be NHS England, and they didn't set this up, although they might sta.rt being involved to check the controls.

The local NHS, the Clinical Commissioning Group, didn't set this up.

So we're talking about one hospital trust

but we don't really have the consent-at-scale technology for anything else, do we? tbh it's just this specific NHS Trust that made the call in this instance.

Personally, I see potential in ResearchKit to solve the consent problem re medical data

ResearchKit may be part of the solution for some things, although the auth and data management will be barriers for commercial providers for the near future.

I have a small team that is working with leaders in the space[1] to help many of the major EMR vendors support an open-standards based approach to medical record sharing.

We'll be seeking public feedback when some of the preliminary work is ready, but are very excited to get input from the community as we make progress.

[1] https://dbmi.hms.harvard.edu/news/more-power-patients