Belgium’s steps to share medical data echoed in UK

Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has put forward the case to make available anonymized medical data stored on 2.5% of the Belgian population, more than 300,000 people, in order to promote “scientific progress” prompting calls for a similar program in the UK.

Speaking to eyeforpharma, De Croo (pictured during a visit to Novartis) said: “This has the potential to change a lot of things for the healthcare landscape. There’s a lot of data on clinical trials and that’s a positive thing, but it’s much better to get real data on real outcomes from real environments. This is going to move health care research in a very dramatic way.”

UK data collection launched