Saw this report in today’s Guardian having just read the Connecting for Health 05/06 business plan. Surely if there’s one thing that would get the medical profession motivated about the benefits of C4H its that in a few years it will as a result (see Financial Times article on Monday) in an unparalleld national dataset on patient health which can be mined? But that opportunity will be wasted if the bureaucracy issue is not sorted:

“Tens of thousands of lives are being lost every year in the UK because medical researchers are hampered by bureaucracy in obtaining patient data, according to scientists. A report published yesterday by the Academy of Medical Sciences said that large population-scale medical studies are in jeopardy because of an “undue emphasis on privacy” by regulators.”