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08 May 2024 By - Project Help Global

Should Clinical Data Be Made Available To The Public?

            Clinical Data is data collected either during a clinical trial or during the ongoing patient care program (Wealth Science Library, 2022). With a lot of clinical data made available for public use, the question concerning the security of the clinical data is whether the clinical data be made public or be kept in the repositories as private property. This paper will closely look into various pros and cons of making the data public and why clinical data should be made available for public use.

            Owing to the virtue of data being derived from the public and the data being collected and compiled with the help of public funding, clinical data should be made public (Institute of Medicine, 2010). However, since private entities may also use these data for their use, the proprietary value of these public data is at the stake of being used for the good of the private entities. To combat the misuse of clinical data, legal considerations can help to preclude effective data sharing as well as aggregation of these data by private entities (Institute of Medicine, 2010). 

            Since clinical data holds a huge potential to drive progress in the healthcare delivery system, develop and refine healthcare practices, and enable rapid innovation in the healthcare landscape, the sharing of data with the public is of great relevance for the development and progress of the healthcare ecosystem (Institute of Medicine, 2011). Undoubtedly, open access to the clinical data of healthcare professionals and the public not only helps the data to be used in the progress of the healthcare systems but also ensures the participation of the public to ensure social benefits to the nation. Although, there is a con or a risk of misappropriation of the data to be used by private entities, the pros of ensuring the progress of the nation’s healthcare ecosystem as well as the use of the data of the people and for the people outweigh these risks. Thus, with the stringent national law and the legal barriers in place for the protection of clinical data from access by private entities, the data should be made available for public use to ensure sound growth and effective healthcare delivery across the nation.

References

Institute of Medicine (2010) Clinical Data as the Basic Staple of Health Learning; 4 – Healthcare      Data: Public Good or Private property? National Library of Medicine. NIH. Available at 

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK54304/

Institute of Medicine (2011) Patients Charting the Course; 3- Clinical Data as a Public Good for 

            Discovery. National Library of Medicine. NIH. Available at 

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92065/ 

Wealth Sciences Library (2022) Data Resources in the Health Sciences. University of 

            Washington. Available at https://guides.lib.uw.edu/hsl/data/findclin