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A pile of patient data that was sent to NHS England from doctors to research Covid-19 just happened to get poured into the NHS’s new LLM, Foresight. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners have referred NHS England to the Information Commissioner’s Office: [RCGP; Politico]
The methodology appears to be new, contentious, and potentially with wide repercussions. It appears unlikely that a proposal would have been supported without additional, extraordinary agreements to permit it. The self-declared scope of this project appears inconsistent with the legal basis under which these data were to be used.
Foresight wants to use anonymised data from everyone in England to produce exciting new insights into health. It runs in-house at University College London on a copy of Facebook’s Llama 2. [UCL]
The British public is overwhelmingly supportive of good use of health data. But they also worry about their data being sent off to private companies like Palantir. [Understanding Patient Data; Pharmacy Business; Guardian, 2023]
And, of course, there’s not really such a thing as anonymised data. It’s notoriously easy to de-anonymise a data set. NHS England is mostly using “anonymised” as an excuse to get around data protection issues. [New Scientist, archive]
NHS England says it’s “paused” data collection and launched an internal audit of the project. They insist that taking care of it themselves is fine and they don’t need some outsiders — like, say, the data protection authority for the UK — sticking their noses in. The investigation proceeds.
