How safe is your medical record?

It seems that we are getting an idea of just how safe your medical data is while the NHS roles out it's national Patient Record Database system.

According to this ComputerWeekly.com story, at least 50 employees at the North Tees Primary Care Trust logged on and accessed the medical records of a Celebrity (we don't know or care who it was) that was a patient of the trust. A second story about the incident can be found here at Guardian Online.

Clearly 50 staff accessing a patients' record is far above what would normally be required for any non-celebrity patient - at least I think it is!

I hope that the senior management of the North Tees Primary Care Trust, when they have carried out their review of this incident will sanction the staff members who accessed the records without any professional need to.

They will be able to find who accessed the data very easily as the Care Record system that is implemented at the North Tees Primary Care Trust tracks who logged on, which records were accessed and for how long and what if anything was printed out. Or does it?

In a very similar incident in Ireland after Dolores McNamara won her Euro Lottery prize...

"72 Department of Social and Family Affairs civil servants had illicitly accessed McNamara's electronic welfare records in the days following her lottery win. The civil servants received formal reprimands, and the case occasioned public debate about the confidentiality of personal information stored in government computer systems."

I wonder what action UK government will take about the North Tees Primary Care Trust incident to reassure all of us that our private medical record data will not be abused by illicit accesses and potentially passed onto other third parties.

This incident of course not only shows a failing with the way that access is being granted to medical records within the NHS - some 330,000 could have access to your medical records. But also throws into question how access is being controlled for other government databases such as ContactPoint (formally The Children's Database), the Police National DNA Database and the Criminal Records Bureau to name just three.

More to follow on this story, I think.

Technorati Tags: NHS IT Programme, Medical Care Records