Aggregating and sharing data needs to be at the very heart of clinical research but a major barrier is the protection rightly afforded patients privacy. The question of who owns data is obvious at source, but as its aggregated that ownership becomes a lot less clear. In Preparing Raw Clinical Data for Publication Trials Journal [...]
Maybe a new contract is needed between medicine and society that assumes a default position that says that everyone attending hospital should be involved in medical research, unless they specifically opt out of the process at the time of consent? This approach has already been used in some European countries for organ donation and has [...]