Leader: Should we doubt NHS IT?

News today that the NHS has been forced to allow patients to opt-out from sharing their information on the forthcoming electronic patient record system reflects the terrible reputation the public sector has built for IT projects and data protection.

In truth, with the government's history of disastrous tech projects and giant leaks of personal information, it is hard to blame patients for being nervous about allowing their data to be shared.

Still it is shameful public confidence in these projects is so low that a sizeable number don't want to risk having basic medical data on the network, even though there are clear advantages to having that info recorded - such as having a patient's medication allergies available when admitted to A&E.

Patients have legitimate concerns that their personal data will be put in danger - and by allowing them to opt out the government seems to be admitting to doubts about its ability to keep data safe.

It is not as if that data is especially safe at the moment, and so perhaps some of the objections are based on a lack of information.

After all, at the moment patients have some security through obscurity. It's relatively difficult to get at the data in a GP practice, if only because much of it is sitting in a paper document in a filing cabinet or on the GP's computer system.

Few hackers would waste their time trying to attack an individual GP's office to access data - in contrast the uploaded care record would be a very juicy target for a hacker to go after.

But the NHS should be able to provide better security than an individual GP can come up with. And yet it seems many patients don't believe that it can.

There is a danger this will turn into a missed opportunity to save lives. Why let vital information rot in a doctor's file when it could be of use in an emergency situation?

There is a risk we will end up with a two-tier health service, where some are confident enough about the design and security of the system to allow their data to be shared while others will shy away, fearful their data will be poured over by snoops and hackers.

The broader question is how to address this public crisis of confidence in the performance of IT projects. After all, if the public gets a taste for opting out because they don't trust the widgets to work, the government could find itself short of more than a few patient records.