By Carmel Williams
Big Data is transforming health care in multiple ways, from patient management to diagnostic and treatment methods. These new technologies are changing the health and public health landscapes, offering improved public health and clinical care. However, careful oversight of proposed uses of Big Data technologies is needed to protect against discrimination and increasing health inequities. In this blog, I propose that governments should undertake human rights impact assessments, including assessments that integrate right to health impacts, before using Big Data driven technologies in health. These assessments provide a structured approach to examining multiple ways in which the right to health could be at risk, including, but moving beyond, privacy issues.
Examples of the use of Big Data in healthcare include personalised medicine where a patient’s treatment is tailored to their genetic and environmental profile, DNA sequencing (which results in vast amounts of data stored in bio banks), forensic, genetic or medical databases, including data from public health studies and clinical trials – and all of which can be re-purposed for various technical inventions. The artificial intelligence (AI) industry in health care is booming, with growth rates in economic terms of around 40% per annum, reaching over $US6 billion by 2021. All this depends on access to huge data sets.
The concerns about the use of patient data, whether for patient management or clinical purposes, have focused predominantly on privacy and breaches of security. Although this is crucially important, here I examine broader social and economic rights issues, through the use of an abridged right to health framework (see the Oxford Textbook of Global Public Health, chapter 3.3, new version due in 2020).
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