Earlier this week, Health Minister, Wes Streeting, announced new plans for a scheme he called “Patient passports”. These passports will be digital documents that contain every NHS patient’s personal medical record. Supposedly, they are significantly easier for GPs, hospitals and ambulance services to access.
The idea behind this, and the government’s wider consultation on NHS digitalisation over the next ten years, is to reduce NHS wait times and revitalise the service. Streeting suggested that it will speed up patient care, reduce repeat medical tests and minimise medication errors.
The minister also announced that new laws would be introduced to standardise information systems across the NHS, again cutting down on the ever-discussed issue of waiting times.
At first glance, this seems like a great new policy, many might be asking why this hasn’t been done before. However, these people might not have the sour taste left in their mouths by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and such like.
The issue is, of course, at its most dangerous when concerning medical records. After all, it’s one thing for your interest in Corecore to be sold to an advertising company, it is a whole other thing for your medical data to be breached and sold illegally to The Tab Edinburgh.
However, according to the Times Health Commission, 56% of people would prefer the increased ease in booking appointments and receiving care to the risk of privacy and security breach, while there were only 22% who said the opposite. 68% of people also said that they would be content with the NHS sharing their data with other health workers.
A scheme that would vastly improve the processes of medical research in the UK, yet it still seems slightly concerning how little reassurance the government has given on the subject of cyber security. Besides Mr Streeting’s verbal assurance that this data will be ‘Protected and anonymised’, for a country whose cyber security ranks 18th in the world according to the National Cyber Security Index, it feels slightly like driving an eighteen-wheeled lorry on paper thin ice.
In an age when cyber terrorism is one of the biggest threats to national security, this plan feels like a potentially very dangerous short term solution to a major problem and, more concerningly, one that the public seems not to mind.
“File:Official portrait of Wes Streeting (cropped).jpg” by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0.