NHS to Share Patient Data With Industry?

Prime Minister David Cameron will give a speech today in which he'll announce plans for NHS to share its wealth of patient data with private industry, in order to boost the health sciences industry and speed up drug development. The government has assured critics that patient data will be properly anonymized, but there are already protests to the effect that privacy protections won't be adequate, firms will be able to re-identify private health information, and so on. In the same speech, Cameron will announce increased support for and use of tele-medical patient monitoring, and a program to give cancer patients and other seriously-ill patients early access to as-yet-unlicensed drugs.