By Andy McCue, 23 May 2005 14:45
NEWS Guidelines aimed at addressing patients' fears over personal medical information that will be held in the NHS electronic patient record system have been issued by the government.
Health minister Lord Warner has published a 'care record guarantee' that covers patients' access to their own records, controls over who else can access the information and options for patients who want to limit access further or opt-out altogether.
NHS staff will only have access to records on a "need to know" basis in the course of treating a patient, while patients will have the right to restrict the sharing of information on their records with anyone in the NHS or even deny access to anyone outside the organisation which created it.
But Warner warned that there may be an impact on the quality of care for those patients who do decide to restrict access to their electronic records.
"These rules will be backed up with tough security measures to prevent unauthorised access to records, ensuring everyone can have confidence in the new system," he said in a statement.
The guidelines have been drawn up by the Care Record Development Board, which is chaired by Harry Cayton, the Department of Health's national director for patients and the public, after consultation with various NHS and patient advisory groups.
Warner said the guidelines will be reviewed and updated every six months as the NHS care records system is rolled out.
BT won the £620m contract to develop the national "spine" for the electronic patient record system, which will link into regional NHS systems being implemented by Accenture, BT, CSC and Fujitsu.
Comments
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1. Gary Boardman
Surely this is already covered by the Data Protection Act, especially as this is sensitive personal data?
2. anonymous
Surely ID card data stored on the national database would be just as intrusive - and yet people seem happy to have this, according to the Govt.
3. anonymous
I've had some experience of data in trhe NHS. I was asked to construct a database to summarise statistics about client ethnographies. The results would have been anomynous and I could also have worked without patient names, etc. However, no one seemed to know what was and wasn't appropriate and were releuctant to share data, or even data structures, so I could send them queries in a common format. perhaps this new system, will allow the creation of these type of reports more easily?
4. anonymous
Can't be worse than the paper ones.....