Last week NHS England agreed to delay its medical record sharing project (Care.data) by six months, so that people could be better informed about its "benefits".
This delay prompted a backlash from various organisations (eg the BMA) accusing the NHS of backing down to scaremongering (whipped up by the media and various pressure groups) about the dangers of sharing data.
One week on and blinkey blonky blimey we see that the the NHS has been forced to admit that it has been wrongly sharing hospital admission data (from 1989 to 2010) with the insurance industry (the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries).
The information given to the Institute (in exchange for a nominal sum of £2,220) contained details on treatments and diagnoses, age, the area the patient lived in, but not their names. The information was used to produce a report to help insurance firms price their products.
The Health and Social Care Information Centre, which runs the database of records, said "greater scrutiny" should have been applied.
No kidding!
A spokeswoman for the Health and Social Care Information Centre is quoted by the BBC:
"The HSCIC believes greater scrutiny should have been applied by our predecessor body [the centre was known as the NHS Information Centre at the time] prior to an instance where data was shared with an actuarial society.I wonder why the rules were not followed, and why the sum Nanny received was so small?
We would like to restate that full postcodes and dates of birth were not supplied as part of this data and that it was not used to analyse individual insurance premiums, but to analyse general variances in critical illness.
We are absolutely committed to the public understanding what is being done with their information."
I don't know what annoys me more, the fact that Nanny shared the data with the wrong people or that she sold it for a pittance.
Either way this clearly shows that Nanny cannot be trusted with our data!
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Who actually owns the records, written and digital? According to this (from 1991), the doctor owns the paper they're written on and possibly their and other NHS inputs. But, it could be argued that any information provided by the patient remains their 'property'. This would presumably include smoking, drinking, diet and exercise status. It's pretty clear that dissemination of this data to other health organisations will be used to lobby for more control of peoples lifestyles, and this is one of the main reasons for betraying patient confidentiality.
ReplyDeletehttp://jme.bmj.com/content/17/3/138.full.pdf