Jo Macfarlane reports:
The confidential medical records of patients treated at one of Britain’s top private hospitals have been illegally sold to undercover investigators.
Hundreds of files containing intimate details of patients’ conditions, home addresses and dates of birth are being offered for as little as £4 each.
The files were sold by two men who claimed to have gained access to the information from IT companies in India, where thousands of British medical records are sent every year to be computerised.
They supplied more than 100 records belonging to UK patients but claimed they would be able to pass on hundreds of thousands more on demand.
[…]
The London Clinic said it dealt with its own files internally and did not send them to private companies.
But it admitted advising a group of consultants to use a specialist Buckingham-based IT company, DGL Information Technologies UK, with which the clinic has a contract, to help turn paper records into computerised files.
It is believed that these were the files eventually sold to the ITV investigators.
DGL itself did not handle the records but recommended that the doctors use a document-scanning service provided by a company it has a contract with, Scanning And Data Solutions, which operates from a residential address near Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.
Scanning And Data Solutions collected the paper records from doctors at the London Clinic and scanned them into computers in the UK.
However, it then sub-contracted further work on the files – which involved putting them in order on a database – to a company in Pune, India.
Read more in The Daily Mail.