Jack Doyle reports:
GPs are to be forced to hand over confidential records on all their patients’ drinking habits, waist sizes and illnesses.
The files will be stored in a giant information bank that privacy campaigners say represents the ‘biggest data grab in NHS history’.
They warned the move would end patient confidentiality and hand personal information to third parties.
The data includes weight, cholesterol levels, body mass index, pulse rate, family health history, alcohol consumption and smoking status.
Diagnosis of everything from cancer to heart disease to mental illness would be covered. Family doctors will have to pass on dates of birth, postcodes and NHS numbers.
Officials insisted the personal information would be made anonymous and deleted after analysis.
Read more on Daily Mail.
And if you’re looking for additional information on the Everyone Counts initiative, you might want to check out this NHS Commissioning Board web site. One of the documents on that site provides more details on the clinical data sets and the types of information GPs are required to submit.
It is understandable, and even commendable, that public health authorities want to get a handle on the state of the public’s health and available services to improve them. Our own CDC also compiles data that points to underserved groups of patients, etc. But requiring physicians to provide such extensive information on every patient in conjunction with the patient’s national NHS identifier when we know that the NHS has had numerous data security and privacy breaches is a breach waiting to happen. Under the scheme, GPs would be providing:
- NHSNumber
- Date of Birth
- Gender
- PostCode
- EthnicityCode
- Registration Status
- RegistrationDate
- DeRegistrationDate
- Date of Death
And then there is all the medical/mental health information.
I think the NHS is overly and unduly confident of its ability to secure data. How many thousands of people will have access to the data that has been electronically inputted by physicians? And for how long will they store the data before it is analyzed and then deleted?
Overall, it appears that the NHS has taken the notion of public health to an extreme at the expense of patient confidence in the confidentiality of their visits to their doctors. How many patients will not seek care for fear of mental health or other problems being reported to a central authority?
Just as health care professionals in the U.S. need to resist some government plans to require us to provide data on our patients, so, too, do British health care organizations need to take a long hard look at confidentiality issues. The BMA has expressed some concerns, but confidentiality doesn’t appear to be among them. Hopefully they will address confidentiality and security issues in a further post.