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 [...]

Yesterday, on the Andrew Marr show, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced the NHS IT project will be seeing serious cuts as part of a crack down on government spending. He argued that “the NHS has quite an expensive IT system that, frankly, is not essential for the front line. That’s something we do not need to [...]

It looks like the NHS hasn’t given up on providing patients with access to their records, after all. This week Connecting for health announces they’re hoping to do more work on their patient access website Healthspace.
One of the reasons HealthSpace was shelved back in June was the low take-up of patients who chose to access [...]

In June we mentioned that the NHS was halting developments to HealthSpace after a low take-up of patients choosing to log on in pilot areas. The NHS promised further investigation into the value of HealthSpace to patients before reviewing where to go from here.
Well, that research is now being carried out and you can fill [...]

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 [...]

There’s some big news breaking over at the specialist E-Health Insider blog, which today reports that the Department of Health has shelved plans for the expansion and development of HealthSpace.  Healthspace was intended to be an all-singing all dancing NHS website which let patients book appointments, look at their medical records and keep track of [...]

There’s been a couple of interesting stories on electronic patient records doing the rounds this week which highlight some of their potential – and some of their risks.
The Charm Project, which is beiing run by a coalition of British universities, will be using technology to help people control the amount of exercise they do. [...]

At a recent trial event for our Democs kit, some people were questioning why we would want to let people add their own information to their patient record. Patients, they suggested, couldn’t be trusted to add accurate, useful data. Patient-provided information would be more likely to confuse than illuminate.
At the time, I was more hopeful, [...]