[motives]

To counter your devils advocate, universities within the UK which perform the most cutting edge research in this specific field are already closely linked to specialist hospitals, and can obtain the kind of data they need on a targeted and explicitly consensual basis. The fallacy that more data inherently leads to better ML affords poorer quality research, and explainability often lags behind in these cases.

Its hard to compare NLP (such as pretrained transformer models) to medical ML because there are real and potentially fatal implications to misdiagnosis. The focus should be on small scale and explainable ML, not brute forcing patterns across large populations (which is more effective for insurance companies than clinicians). FWIW, I'm a massive fan of the potential of CV in diagnosis, and in aiding spotting abnormalities early, but I think the proposed opening up of data is absolutely the wrong way to see innovation in this field.