Worrying over danger of electronic patient record
THE North Kirklees Clinical Commissioning Group meeting in Batley Town Hall featured few members of the public, most attendees being from a ‘provider’ charity or organisation.
The CCG was asked by the big NHS bosses to ‘engage’ on how the public wants the NHS to share its individual patient data, ready for the roll out of the majority of the Transformation money awarded to the West Yorkshire Footprint ICS, into Information Technology.
Data is very valuable. I value mine greatly. I am very cautious about the NHS ‘electronic’ patient record. Why? Some downsides. It is hackable.
I may not want to be a politician in the future, but some younger people may develop that ambition.
Enemies will have the opportunity to hack medical records to find out about the treatment someone had for an indiscretion when young, the donation to a reproductive clinic, their offspring from the donation making them vulnerable to blackmail etc etc.
Insurance companies and prospective employers may buy hacked data and use it to refuse insurance, market products, or deny the chance of a job.
Sharing between agencies which are there to ‘help’ eg community provider, private company, home care company, charity providing material help, opens up more risk of unauthorised sharing by employees needing extra cash.
People ‘helping’ can sign you up for something without your consent, by the touch of a finger on a screen.
How do surgeries know to stop your repeat prescriptions of newly prescribed drugs without you knowing, without trawling through patient records.
In future, this will be as easy as the click of a mouse for a whole hub-style practice of 30,000 to 50,000?
Do we want to trust our doctor patient relationship to comput- ers, algorithms which have always have a bias inbuilt by the programmer and the risk of data slurping? Are we sure the computer is right? Do we want our data shared with pharmaceutical companies looking for cures? Personally I don’t.
Banks don’t tell you how much they lose to hacking each year but it is £billions. Will the NHS be as secretive?