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The government has brushed aside calls for acute hospital trusts to be allowed to implement alternative electronic patient record systems if the £12.7bn NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) does not make sufficient progress with its own software. Read more on computing.co.uk

Rebecca Thomson reports: A leading DNA scientist whose work led to the creation of the DNA database has called for innocent people to be removed from it. Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting, says forcing innocent people to remain on the database will erode public support for the project. Currently anyone who is arrested…

Government is taking a bold step in legislating to gain access to the private health records of all Australians. An exposure draft of legislation quietly released on the Thursday night before Easter will give government the right to access all information recorded by doctors on individual patients records. Read more on Medindia.com

John Timmer writes in Ars Technica: The US government has now adopted a policy of fostering the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR). The policy is intended to increase the efficiency of the US healthcare system, thereby lowering costs and reducing the incidence of preventable errors. At the same time, through its The Health Insurance…

Nicholas Kolakowski reports: Google Health, Google’s healthcare IT solution, has been called to task by physicians who say the billing information it uses for some patients’ electronic medical records can give an inaccurate picture of their health condition. Since rolling out in Feb. 2008, Google Health has been aligned to compete against Microsoft’s healthcare IT…

  Neil Versel of BNET reports: Although Google and Microsoft have gotten plenty of attention for their Web-based personal health records, both companies have long maintained that they’re not bound by the privacy protections of a 1996 federal law known as HIPAA. And despite a recent HIPAA change — one intended to extend its privacy…