The House of Commons Health Select Committee recently launched an enquiry into data sharing between NHS Digital and the Home Office, where the Home Office can request NHS digital to trace and share information relating to individuals suspected of immigration crimes with the Home Office.

Medical professionals claim that this breaks Dr/patient trust, prevents some people from seeking appropriate medical help. Home Office, on the other hand, have a public duty to understand where immigrants are and what services they are drawing on in order to have a robust and enforceable immigration policy.

There have been other recent examples of data privacy challenges in health including Public Health England recently releasing the anonymised details of 180,000 lung cancer patients to a firm working for Philip Morris under an FOI request. Privacy campaigners describe the action as an “outrage”. While The ICO recently found that the Google / Deepmind / Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust broke the data protection act.

Join us with lead discussant including Nicky Stewart, Commercial Director at UKCloud and Gavin Lewis, Head of Alliances at Mylifedigital to discuss these recent examples of data privacy and to ask:

• How do we balance the need for medical information against the need for patient privacy and trust?
• Can the two be reconciled and will the GDPR help?
• Should the GDPR have stronger provisions to protect patient data, even if it is anonymised; and
• Will GDPR reconcile or further diverge competing for policy priorities?

Places are limited and the event will be followed by networking.