More or Less
The digital ‘robots’ unlocking medical data
Up next
17 February 2024
Available for over a year
Big medical datasets pose a serious problem. Thousands of patients’ health records are an enormous risk to personal privacy. But they also contain an enormous opportunity – they could show us how to provide better treatments or more effective health policies.
A system called OpenSAFELY has been designed to solve this problem, with the help of a computer code “robot”.
Professor Ben Goldacre, director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford, explains how it works.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples
Sound mix: Hal Haines
Editor: Charlotte McDonald