EDRi writes:
After almost two years of legislative negotiations, lawmakers from the European Parliament and EU member states have agreed on a compromise for the new European Health Data Space (EHDS) last week.
Unfortunately, the EHDS compromise will expose everyone’s medical records to unnecessary security and privacy risks in the name of research and “innovation”. It mandates every hospital and every doctor to share the private medical data from every single patient—for the purpose of secondary use, i.e. unrelated to the patient’s treatment—with a national agency, the so-called health data access body. Exactly how and what patient data is going to be shared may vary from member state to member state.
Patient consent watered down
From the start, EDRi, many other organisations and over 112,000 people across Europe demanded a clear obligation to ask patients for their consent before this kind of health data sharing for secondary purposes takes place. While this has not found a majority, we successfully pushed EU parliamentarians to adopt at least a right for patients to opt out. Unfortunately, this opt-out right as a bare minimum level of protection has now been watered down with so many loopholes and exceptions by member states and the conservative lead negotiator, Tomislav Sokol, that the result can barely be called ‘opt-out right’ at all. As a result, even data from people who have opted out can now be shared for secondary use if requested by public authorities or other parties commissioned by public authorities.
Read more at EDRi.
h/t, Joe Cadillic