That is hyperbole. There is zero evidence that open access to medical data would accelerate research by 20×. Most clinical research studies are structured with defined data gathering protocols where patients give informed consent, and this works fine.
Some naive software developers and data scientists have this fantasy that if they could just data mine millions of patient charts that they could discover all sorts of medical insights that would save lives. This is almost totally false.
The real issue with using research data from multiple organizations has more to do with quality and consistency than privacy rules. Various provider organizations will record the same clinical data in different and incompatible ways, or often fail to record it at all. Researchers working with such data have to devote huge efforts to building pipelines for validation, cleansing, and normalization.
Some naive software developers and data scientists have this fantasy that if they could just data mine millions of patient charts that they could discover all sorts of medical insights that would save lives. This is almost totally false.
The real issue with using research data from multiple organizations has more to do with quality and consistency than privacy rules. Various provider organizations will record the same clinical data in different and incompatible ways, or often fail to record it at all. Researchers working with such data have to devote huge efforts to building pipelines for validation, cleansing, and normalization.