Scotsman.com News - Latest News - 'Mouse Click' Patient Records 'Will Be More Secure'

The Government today attempted to allay fears that confidential patient records will not be secure under the national IT network for the NHS.

Work on the National Programme for IT is being stepped up this year so all patients in England have an individual electronic care record that follows them around different parts of the NHS – available at just a few mouse clicks.

The Choose and Book system, where GPs make referrals to hospitals online while a patient sits in their surgery, should be available across England by the end of the year.

But the British Medical Association (BMA) and others are worried about confidentiality in the new system and the time it would take up during an average 10-minute GP consultation.

Today Health Minister John Hutton and Richard Granger, director general for NHS IT, led a demonstration at the Department of Health of how the IT system works in practice.

Doctors and IT experts involved in developing the system performed a role-playing exercise to show that patient records will not be compromised and that only staff with a legitimate interest to access the information will be allowed to see it.

Mr Granger said the electronic records would be more secure than the millions of paper documents which currently float around the NHS.

“The system will log every person who accesses a patient’s information.

“Currently there is no record of who has accessed what.

“At the moment it is very difficult to control who picks notes up,” he said.

Mr Hutton said that patients would have the choice to opt out and not have their records kept on the national database.

He said the Department of Health would launch a publicity campaign later this year to tell the public about the IT system and let them know it was up to them if they did not want to participate.

“If patients don’t want their records stored then people won’t.

“I believe very few people will opt out of the records.

“I hope and believe that patients will want to be part of this because it will help to save people’s lives,” Mr Hutton said.

He said NHS records would not be accessible under the planned national ID card register.

Around 48 million patient records in England and Wales are already stored electronically.

Eventually patients will have access to their own records over the internet, it is hoped.

Mr Granger said the current system of paper records could lead to documents being lost and damaged.

It also made it difficult for health workers in different hospitals or surgeries to find data on patients they were treating.

“Paper is pretty dangerous for patients. It gets lost, can lead to prescription errors and so on,” Mr Granger said.

“The current situation is dangerous. Almost every clinician I talk to would like not to have to chase down notes.”

Mr Hutton said it was inevitable that a system of this scale would hit problems concerning money or integration from time to time and it would be monitored very carefully.

“It has the potential literally to transform the health service into a state-of-the-art health service.

“It will improve the quality of healthcare we provide and it will save lives,” he added.

Last year, Computer Weekly magazine suggested that the total implementation costs of the IT programme could be as much as £31 billion, compared to a procurement price agreed by the Government of £6 billion.

Mr Granger said there had been no significant increases in their existing contracts and he had not had to ask for extra money to support the programme.