What can we salvage from care.data?

By now, if all had gone to plan, England would be reaping the early benefits of a national database of patients’ medical records spanning primary and secondary care. Patients would have the comfort of knowing that their records could soon be accessed wherever they were treated; the ability to monitor outcomes might already be suggesting better ways of doing things; and researchers might be starting to interrogate anonymised datasets to generate and test hypotheses. But all did not go …