Big news for electronic patient records this week. Doctors’ representative body, The British Medical Association has called for uploads to the Summary Care Records service to be halted. Smarthealthcare has the story:

The British Medical Association has written to health minister Mike O’Brien, expressing ’serious concern’ about the widespread introduction of Summary Care Records
The BMA also [...]

The Department of Health last year ran a consultation into who should have access to patients’ medical data. More precisely, they wanted to know about ‘additional uses’ of patient records, apart from the patients’ medical care, and about the different systems which should be in place for ‘anonymised’ and ‘identifiable’ records. They had public meetings [...]

Things are finally getting going for the Summary Care Record. During the last few years, there have been pilots in Bury, Bradford, Bolton, Dorset, South West Essex and South Birmingham. But now we’re leaving the trial stage behind, and aiming for roll-out across London and then the rest of England in the next few years.
It’ll [...]

True to his name, the blogger The Yorkshire Ranter has launched a fierce (and in places rather convincing) attack on  Tory plans to hand over the NHS IT plans to Google or Microsoft. His cynicism stems from the rather philosophical point that ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’
Unlike the NHS, nobody pretends [...]

Over at the Guardian’s Smarthealthcare, details of a new announcement by David Cameron may prove concerning for privacy advocates. Against a background of significant criticism of the NHS IT programme by the opposition, the Tory leader has suggested a different approach to the management of our healthcare data. His inspiration is Google Health and Microsoft [...]

A couple of weeks ago, largely un-noticed, Connecting for Health made an announcement with potentially huge effects on the way that patient consent works for the Summary Care Record (SCR). Under new rules announced last month, the NHS will now be able to delete SCRs provided that they have not been used for treatment.
In the [...]