The Icelandic Healthcare Database and Informed Consent

Abstract

Modern information technology is rapidly changing how new knowledge is discovered in most fields of science, including medicine. This technology offers interesting possibilities in the development of methods to understand diseases better, but it also presents new ethical challenges. The new technology offers the possibility of mining large data sets for knowledge, without a priori hypotheses, by systematically juxtaposing various data in the search for the best fit. This kind of pure combinatorial analysis may be particularly powerful in the case of the common diseases, most of which are complex and have remained beyond the reach of the classic hypothesis-driven . . .