A related concern is the balance between the need to protect the privacy
of individual patients and the need for access to clinical data in the claimed
datasets in order to assess performance and hold providers accountable. In the
first 10 years of the UCS most of the effort was focused on protecting patient
privacy and so, for example, researchers and evaluators had no access to
anonymized patient records and datasets.
Finally, priority setting and trade-offs were not consistently explicit in all policy
processes and this compromised accountability and led to conflict.
Overall governance of the NHSB and its subcommittees
Overall, the governance arrangements associated with the NHSB, the Benefit
Package Subcommittee, the Financial Subcommittee and the Strategic
Coordinating Subcommittee were mostly rated at a high level across a range
of attributes. The results from an NHSB survey are summarized in Figure 9 below.