National Health Service: Healthcare Advice

Lord Fox Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I thank the noble Baroness for that. I would be interested to know what jokes she has heard from Alexa in her family conversations. However, patients look on well-known search engines for medical advice and at the moment they may receive advice from all sorts of untested sources. NHS.uk is clinically based advice which has been approved by NHS England. The purpose of making that advice more available through the Open API, which is available through the developer system, is to ensure that that clinically based advice is more widely available and more readily searchable for patients. A reasonable point has been raised which is to ensure that the right advice reaches patients and that patients go through the right triage system, whether it is 111 or another system, but that is the intention of the programme. It will be carefully monitored and managed by NHSX, NHS England and the department.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, there is a wider principle here. Even if effective, anonymised data is gathered and generated, where does the value lie in that data? Can the Minister tell us whether the Government have discussed and agreed with Amazon where the value lies and who gathers that value? On the overall principle, can the Minister tell us that when this data generates value, it is the NHS that benefits and not the private sector?

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

Amazon is not sharing any of the information that it gathers from third parties. It is not selling products or making product recommendations based on health information, nor is it building a health profile on patients. It has strict technical and operational safeguards in place so that Amazon employees will not have direct access to information that can identify any person or account. As I have already said, it does not have access to any health data based on this contract. No health data is being shared between the NHS and Amazon. Just yesterday we launched some new data-sharing principles which are designed to improved clarity around health data-sharing between the NHS and private companies so that we can improve public and clinician confidence on this issue.