We are witnessing a growing revolution around the provision of healthcare. Much is being driven by the proliferation of medical data and the technology that supports this. As the pressures on healthcare providers continue to escalate, the better collection, management and use of more patient-specific information provides a significant opportunity for innovation and change. The Future Agenda team made this, the Future of Patient Data, the focus of our major Open Foresight project for 2017/18 – 12 discussions across 11 countries, gathering views from over 300 experts.

This report shares the findings from the Future of Patient Data research project. It highlights several important emerging issues that are the source of major differences of opinion around the world. These include how to best accommodate rising data sovereignty concerns, the privatisation of health information and the growing value of health data. Some of the challenges and opportunities are technical in nature, but many are concerned with different ethical, philosophical and cultural approaches to health and how we treat the sick in society.

In addition to providing a rich global perspective from across a selection of different healthcare systems, the research explores a wide breadth of issues including data infrastructure, governance, the application of patient data for personalised medical research and the development of advanced, consumer-focused digital healthcare services. It shows that entire new research opportunities business models and marketplaces are emerging from the combination of broadening patient data sets and highlights two diverging ideals: one focused on the need to “free” data to facilitate better research, more open intelligent applications and greater system efficiency; the other arguing for the privatisation of data, extracting value and giving more ownership of key information to some key organisations.

We would very much like to thank the experts who shared their insights and the leading organisations that collaborated to support the project and host the twelve events around the world – Accenture, Amgen, Cognizant, Discovery, Hanson Bridgett, Herman Miller, Pfizer, Philips, TAL, UCB and the Universities of Oslo, Warwick and York in Toronto.