One to keep an eye out for
The UK Department of Health is planning to move all our patient records onto a centralised database. One of their many problems is that UK law requires permission for our data to be moved around or reused for purposes other than those for which it was collected. In this case, that means that they need permission to move data from our GP’s office onto their central database (or from hospital records, for example). However, the DoH doesn’t much like this, people because it believes that it wouldn’t get many people actually to give that permission (whether through apathy or opposition). To get out of this bind, the DoH has decided to go for ‘opt-out’ patient records. That means that they’ll stick the data up on a secure (hopefully!) website for a while and, if you don’t object, they’ll then carry on with what they want.
The British Medical Association supports an ‘opt-in’ model, in which we’d actually have to give explicit consent before our data could be shared in this way. One of their concerns (supported by polls) is that people will stop sharing sensitive information with their doctors for fear that it will end up public knowledge – hardly a good thing for medical care! This will be something worth keeping an eye on in the next few months.
pax et bonum
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