Article Text
Abstract
Introduction International sharing of health data opens the door to the study of the so-called ‘Big Data’, which holds great promise for improving patient-centred care. Failure of recent data sharing initiatives indicates an urgent need to invest in societal trust in researchers and institutions. Key to an informed understanding of such a ‘social license’ is identifying the views patients and the public may hold with regard to data sharing for health research.
Methods We performed a narrative review of the empirical evidence addressing patients’ and public views and attitudes towards the use of health data for research purposes. The literature databases PubMed (MEDLINE), Embase, Scopus and Google Scholar were searched in April 2019 to identify relevant publications. Patients’ and public attitudes were extracted from selected references and thematically categorised.
Results Twenty-seven papers were included for review, including both qualitative and quantitative studies and systematic reviews. Results suggest widespread—though conditional—support among patients and the public for data sharing for health research. Despite the fact that participants recognise actual or potential benefits of data research, they expressed concerns about breaches of confidentiality and potential abuses of the data. Studies showed agreement on the following conditions: value, privacy, risk minimisation, data security, transparency, control, information, trust, responsibility and accountability.
Conclusions Our results indicate that a social license for data-intensive health research cannot simply be presumed. To strengthen the social license, identified conditions ought to be operationalised in a governance framework that incorporates the diverse patient and public values, needs and interests.
- confidentiality/privacy
- information technology
- patient perspective
- scientific research
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors JvD and GvT conceived the idea for this work. SK designed the study and performed acquisition of the data. SK and GvT analysed the data. All authors contributed substantially to interpretation of the data. SK drafted the manuscript, and JvD, AB, BT, MM and GvT substantively revised it. All authors approved the submitted version of the manuscript.
Funding The results presented in this short report were part of Work Package 7 of the BigData@Heart consortium, which received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No. 116055. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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