By Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent
Experts have warned that anonymised NHS medical records could still identify patients.
Under the NHS's care.data scheme, stripped down GP records, including NHS numbers, dates of birth, postcodes, and gender will be uploaded to a central database.
The data will be shared with health bodies, research institutions and private companies to assist research.
However, even these sparse details could be enough to identify an individual, according to Joss Wright, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University.
He told Sky News: "Because there are so many individual points of data, it would be very easy to uniquely identify an individual from the sheer volume of data."
Mr Wright showed Sky News how anonymised information could be combined with publicly available data, from social media and other sources, to quickly identify a patient.
"The Hollywood nightmare scenario is the hacker who gets the whole database and can use this to blackmail people," he said.
"But also there are the corporations who want to access the data, in order to perform long term studies.
"Sometimes that can be a good thing - pharmaceutical companies conducting studies on drugs.
"But also things like credit rating agencies or health insurers who can use it to identify you individually and determine that you have a higher likelihood of certain conditions, so your premiums should be higher."
Care.data was delayed after concerns over patients' privacy. The scheme is due to roll out at 500 GP surgeries as part of a trial stage.
No patient information can be extracted until Dame Fiona Caldicott, the national data guardian, is satisfied that 27 key questions have been answered, following a report from the the Independent Information Governance Oversight Panel, commissioned in May and published in December.
Sky News understands that these questions have not yet been answered by NHS England.
Dr Mike Smith, chairman of The Patients Association, said: "Sky's investigation has shown that in its present state, if (data) were to get out of healthcare and care responsible bodies, it could still be identified by somebody who knew what they were doing.
"(The NHS) needs to show they're able to code it in a way that can't be uncoded. At the moment, it's not quite there but people are working hard on it.
"But care data is shared among responsible groups of people - that is to say, GPs, hospitals and social services who will keep it confidential."
NHS England declined repeated requests from Sky News for an interview or statement.
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