The big vote has now closed. Thank you to everyone who has contributed. We’ll be posting the results here soon.
And expect those results to look very different to the ones below: in the end, nearly twice as many people voted on paper as online.

Please vote by creating an account and then rating the options in order of preference from 1 (favourite) to 5 (least favourite).
We’re reaching the end of our public debate on electronic patient records in the NHS and we’d like you to contribute to an online vote which helps us think about what why the people who [...]

Huge news for electronic patient records today as the Department of Health announces a halt to the rollout of the Summary Care Record database. The database, which will share key medical details with doctors and nurses across the UK, has been heavily criticised by both medical groups and civil rights campaigners who argue that the [...]

You may have missed it, but the last month has seen the simmering disagreement about Summary Care Records explode into open warfare as a number of groups have called on the NHS to halt its accelerated roll-out of the database.
The row centres on the way the roll-out has been handled. Groups likes the British Medical [...]

Over on Smarth Healtchare, Phil Booth, head of the NO2ID campaign against ID cards, has written a scorching attack on the Summary Care Record.
“The creation of centralised systems that make sensitive personal information accessible to many, and not just those directly involved in providing care, undermines the confidence patients can have – must have – [...]

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a Who Sees What discussion event run by an older people’s forum in the North West. One of the most interesting points to come out of the discussion was fears about the accuracy of records. One member of the group quite rightly suggested that if electronic records [...]

At Who Sees What this week we’re too busy helping people put on games to do much blogging, but I thought I’d steer you to this fantastic forecast for 2010 from the Smart Healthcare blog:
Last year saw shockingly disparate reports on the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). Some declared that the programme had been slashed, [...]

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 [...]

Our Democs discussion game which launched in October has already got people across the country talking about Electronic Patient Records. It’s been played by groups as diverse as an NHS Local Involvement Network in North East Lincolnshire, a Citizen’s Advice Bureau in South Devon and medical students at Queen Mary University.
According to Patsy Riggs of an Ataxia [...]

 
On the BBC Health website Dr Graham Easton’s blog gives us a GP’s view the use of electronic patient records in doctors surgeries.
He is a staunch supporter, and provides us a useful reminder of the inadequacies of the previous system which relied on ‘a pile of little brown cardboard packets on my desk – ‘Lloyd [...]