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Make it legally possible for healthcare professionals to use health data from one or more patients in the care of another patient, suggests the government’s special investigator Katarina Nyström on Dagens Nyheter’s debate page.
By removing the legal obstacles, healthcare can utilize the potential of tailored medicine, so-called precision medicine, to make the right diagnosis and provide the right treatment, she believes.
Katarina Nyström takes patients with diseases due to DNA changes as an example.
“To find the possible changes in a specific patient’s DNA, the gene or genome sequence needs to be compared with the sequence from other individuals. The more sequences that can be compared with, the more certain the outcome,” she writes.
The expanded possibilities do not mean that all healthcare personnel must be given the right to search in the so-called precision medicine databases, but “only personnel within the regionally operated specialized care”.
The investigation into secondary use of health data will be submitted to the government on Tuesday. The new rules are proposed to enter into force on 1 January 2025.