I don’t know what 2010 holds for you, but it promises to be a big year for electronic patient records. Tuesday saw David Cameron kicking of the pre-election campaign with a speech which, amongst other things, put online records access at the heart of Conservative NHS policy.

But while Cameron’s announcement that patients will “be able to check your health records online in the same way you do your bank account” is very appealing, there was less detail about how this would be implemented. At present, no one GPs’ surgery or hospital has all the information about every patient so an online access system will need to be able pull together data from multiple places into a single coherent display for the patient – no easy task. And much historical data is still locked away in paper files so, if complete records are to be made available, the huge NHS programme of transferring records to computer will need to carry on in earnest.

In fact, despite their reported hostility to the big NHS databases which have been a feature of Labour health IT policy, any online access system is going to rely heavily on the infrastructure that’s already been put in place, from the N3 national broadband network, to the Spine database which links different patient records systems. Even Cameron’s other announcement – that patients have access to detailed performance statistics for different GPs and hospitals, will rely heavily on patient data collected via the Secondary Uses Service database which has attracted a lot of criticism from privacy campaigners.

If the Tories do win the next election, it’ll be interesting to see how likely Health Secretary Andrew Lansley tackles these apparent contradictions – especially in an environment where money for new projects is extremely difficult to find.

Here’s to an interesting 2010, eh?