Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

Elizabeth Dove (not her real name) contacted me when she found to her dismay that medical information she had given to her GP in confidence had ended up with council workers.

Now Jane Webb has emailed with a similar problem which seems to have no solution.

Article in Daily Telegraph which mentions our claim that the cost of passports is heading toward £200 to pay for ID Cards technolgy, and that the ID Cards scheme is a problem looking for a solution.

Link:

Are passport fees paying for ID Cards? - Computer Weekly

Heading towards the £200 passport - IT projects blog

D Telegraph article

At a breakfast with business leaders last week Jacqui Smith gave a presentation on ID Cards and sounded, well, humble. 

She confirmed her confidence in ID Cards technology: a roll-out of the scheme will begin in Manchester later this year. At times her voice croaked. 

She has had the arrogance that nearly always seems to go with ministership knocked out of her by the media coverage of her second-home claim and her husband's decision to put the cost of the two adult movies on her parliamentary expenses.

In her speech she didn't have the "we-can-do-what-we-like" haughtiness which characterizes some secretaries of state.

Comments by journalist Richard Sarson at a Westminster forum this week highlighted some of the gaps between reality and the NHS's National Programme for IT.

A  technology workshop, which is part of a "major inquiry" into how public services could and should look in 2020 took place in central London this week under the auspices of the RSA.

Whether the public should have a right of opting out of their personal information being given to the government for the benefit of citizens generally was a key theme. I was asked to speak briefly on privacy, technology and security.

One of the things that struck me was the strength of feeling around the table on the need to protect the right of patients to opt out of having an NPfIT summary care record. That said, there was general support for data sharing.  

Report on the round-table

New passport applicants face questions on their credit card debts

Without making any formal policy announcement, the Tories yesterday suggested - unattributably - that health records could be transferred to Google Health or Microsoft's HealthVault, or even Bupa.

Political parties sometimes check reactions to possible policies by giving tentative ideas to newspapers, then seeing what happens. It has worked fairly well - The Times had 119 comments on its article.

It published a follow-up on how ethics could sink the plan for Google or Microsoft health records.

Meanwhile Tom Brooks, a much-respected figure in health service IT, has given his views on the plan and gives the latest thinking on President Obama's healthcare IT proposals. Brooks is a semi-retired healthcare management consultant who still maintains close links with the USA.

Tests of Germany's first-generation electronic health cards and doctors' "health professional cards" have run into problems.  The plan is said to involve the construction of world's largest private key infrastructure (PKI) to allow 80 million health cards and health professional cards to check each other for authenticity.