What does AI plan mean for NHS patient data and is there cause for concern?

Personal health data is by its nature highly sensitive and its vulnerability in a digital environment has already been underlined by recent ransomware attacks that have affected NHS trusts. Andrew Duncan, the director of foundational AI at the UK's Alan Turing Institute, says even anonymised health data can be manipulated to identify a patient through a process known as "re-identification" whereby "de-identified" data can be matched to other available information to identify someone. "Once you start to narrow things down you can start to re-identify people easily," he says. Duncan adds that AI models can be trained in a way that prevents re-identification, although "the caveat is that all of this has to be done very carefully". MedConfidential, which campaigns for confidentiality in healthcare, also wants clarity on whether a health dataset will respect patients who have signed an opt-out that prevents their data being used for research and planning in England.