Current privacy laws prevent research using artificial intelligence (AI), several medical researchers and AI specialists told the Financieel Dagblad (FD). Dutch hospitals are therefore calling for a code of conduct.
The biggest obstacle in sharing medical data is that patients must give consent. Then the information must also be anonymized. This creates a lot of extra administration for a doctor. The problem is acknowledged by the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centers (NFU): "At the moment, we do not succeed in getting permission for patient data on the scale that is actually needed." Arthur Govaert, chief information officer (CIO) at RadboudUMC, also argues that the privacy rules described in the AVG are not feasible: "That is the opinion of several CIOs in Dutch hospitals. It is very problematic to borrow patient databases from each other in Europe. As a result, we will never get a big data pool here for really good research."
The Dutch hospitals are now jointly trying to come to a solution. Together with NFU, a new code of conduct for sharing medical data is being drafted. One way to speed up the process is to ask patients for permission to reuse their data. That way, researchers who want to extract information from previously compiled patient records do not have to ask for approval again for each study.
The code of conduct must be approved by the Autoriteit persoonsgegevens (AP). According to a spokesman for the AP, they have not yet heard anything about a code of conduct. The privacy watchdog calls the handling uncertainty resulting from the privacy rules primarily a problem for hospitals.
This news item can also be found in the files Privacy in Healthcare and AVG
