NHS Connecting for Health begins a public consultation today on
whether details given by patients to GPs, clinics and hospitals
should be shared with medical researchers and others.
The consultation is likely to highlight the divide between those
who want more open sharing of medical records, in the interests of
research, and those who want patient information kept as
confidential as possible.
Connecting for Health is seeking views on the
Secondary Uses Service, which holds details of almost all
visits by patients to hospitals and GPs, partly for research
purposes.
The SUS service is run by BT under the NHS's National Programme
for IT. It is unclear to health officials how much information on
the SUS should be shared inside and outside the NHS: for example,
with council social services departments and researchers.
As well as the SUS, NHS Connecting for Health, which is part of
the Department of Health, is largely responsible for the NHS Care
Records Service, which aims to give 50 million people in England an
electronic medical record.
NHS Connecting for Health says the Care Records Service "offers
new opportunities, with the electronic collection of clinical and
patient data".
For more detail on this story see
Tony Collins' IT Projects Blog: Sharing patient records - Whitehall
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