NHS records, Google and Microsoft: Where do you want your data?

Seven years into the project and the Conservatives want to put it under the knife. But, asks Nick Heath, are the Tories right to bail on the NPfIT?

The Conservatives have come up with a new vision of how to fix the problems plaguing Labour's £12.7bn revamp of NHS IT - put it under the private sector knife.

Under the proposals reported in The Times yesterday, the Conservatives suggest an alternative to the Labour government's plan to create a central Summary Care Record for every patient within the NHS, a scheme currently running at least four years behind schedule according to the Public Accounts Committee.

Instead, patients would be given the option of storing their medical records with private companies, which would then make the records available to patients and health staff via online services such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.

Such a scheme raises big questions over security, and heightens the risk that by passing on patient details to private companies the NHS loses control of how citizens' personal information is kept confidential.

How will these companies manage to strike the tricky balance between easy access for millions of patients and healthcare staff and stopping unauthorised users snooping on records?

The government's National Programme for IT (NPfIT) has struggled to make its revamped vision of healthcare IT a reality - but the question is whether the commercial offerings as envisaged by the Conservatives can offer a better approach, particularly when dealing with access to information that can save a patient's life. Few patients would be willing to put up with an outage on their medical records in the way that they accept their email is sometimes unavailable, for example.

The Conservatives healthcare IT plan also prompts questions over whether scrapping the NPfIT would really benefit the country's bottom line. With £3.5bn already spent on different projects under the National Programme for IT the politicians need to do their sums carefully before wielding the scalpel.

The cost of going back to square one seven years into the NPfIT and transferring vast amounts of patient information out of the NHS systems and into the private sector could put a hefty dent in the saving provided by going down the commercial route.

Hospitals have also already suffered long waits for suppliers to deploy new patient administration systems capable of handling summary care records and won't welcome further delays while other systems are tailored to the UK market and staff are trained to use another new IT set-up.

The plans to create a single electronic medical record are undeniably in a critical condition, with the NHS CIO Christine Connelly giving suppliers six months to speed up delivery of key IT systems.

But we should think carefully before switching off the life support and committing the NHS' already stretched resources to nursing what could end up being another terminal case.