NHS App: Medical Records

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The fundamental principle underlying all this is that none of the data leaves the control. The data controllers today—be it GPs, the NHS or the hospital—stay as they are, and any use of that data has to be approved outside of that. The noble Baroness is absolutely correct. We want to make sure that it is not used for any purposes that are not going to improve health outcomes, such as the ones we have talked about.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, could my noble friend update the House on where we are with sharing data—in particular, the outcomes of clinical trials—with our European partners?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Clinical trials are among the key areas that are vital to the life sciences industry. We are all aware that, post-Covid, we were falling a bit behind. I am glad to say that now we have improved, so that 80% of the time we are doing the clinical responses in time. We can still do better; that should be 100% but 80% is good. Most importantly, our data is the envy of the world. Just to give noble Lords an example, about 90% of our hospital records are digitised. In Germany, it is less than 1%.