Summary Care Record – what’s it about and what’s happening at Kings Medical Practice
The Summary Care Record has been in the news again this week with the BMA writing to the Department of Health expressing serious concerns that the roll out of the programme is going too quickly with not enough consultation with patients.
The Summary Care Record is a national IT system whereby patients address details, medication, allergies, hospital appointments and past medical history will all be held on a central database and will allow anyone treating you to see this data. This will be very useful for doctors seeing you at hospital or as an emergency because they will know what drugs you are taking, what you have had in the past and if anything has been recorded about any allergies or sensitivities you have had.
To access this information staff will have to access it via a SmartCard, will only be able to look at your information if they are treating you as a patient and the information they will see will depend on their role. So a receptionist will not see the same details that a doctor can.
Currently the Department of Health assumes that patients consent to their data being shared like this and if GPs agree then the data GPs have is uploaded to the central database.
The BMA is concerned that patients are not fully aware of what is happening with their data and that their legitimate concerns about whether their data is being held securely and confidentially are not being met.
In Wakefield data from 16 out of 41 practices has been uploaded to the central database. At Kings Medical Practice we have not currently done anything about it and have refused to allow our data to be uploaded to the spine.
We are concerned about the security of the data. Access to the data is via a SmartCard and there is an audit trail on the system to allow access to your personal data to be monitored but there are no checks to stop illegal access to your data. So you can tell if someone has illegally viewed your data but you can’t stop them viewing it in the first place.
Our other concern is with the current implied consent process. When patients data is to be uploaded patients are notified that this is going to happen and it is assumed that patients will consent to this process. We have always believed that our duty under data protection regulations is to get patients consent to share data. This has not happened and when patients are informed that there data is being shared it is currently difficult to object to this.
So ... at Kings Medical Practice nothing much is happening with the Summary Care Record, we have not shared patients data with the central database, locally there is not a critical mass of shared data for it to be used by our hospital colleagues, the only feedback we have had from patients is from those that don’t want their data shared and we think that if there is change of government in May then this is one of the IT schemes that maybe axed!
The Summary Care Record is a national IT system whereby patients address details, medication, allergies, hospital appointments and past medical history will all be held on a central database and will allow anyone treating you to see this data. This will be very useful for doctors seeing you at hospital or as an emergency because they will know what drugs you are taking, what you have had in the past and if anything has been recorded about any allergies or sensitivities you have had.
To access this information staff will have to access it via a SmartCard, will only be able to look at your information if they are treating you as a patient and the information they will see will depend on their role. So a receptionist will not see the same details that a doctor can.
Currently the Department of Health assumes that patients consent to their data being shared like this and if GPs agree then the data GPs have is uploaded to the central database.
The BMA is concerned that patients are not fully aware of what is happening with their data and that their legitimate concerns about whether their data is being held securely and confidentially are not being met.
In Wakefield data from 16 out of 41 practices has been uploaded to the central database. At Kings Medical Practice we have not currently done anything about it and have refused to allow our data to be uploaded to the spine.
We are concerned about the security of the data. Access to the data is via a SmartCard and there is an audit trail on the system to allow access to your personal data to be monitored but there are no checks to stop illegal access to your data. So you can tell if someone has illegally viewed your data but you can’t stop them viewing it in the first place.
Our other concern is with the current implied consent process. When patients data is to be uploaded patients are notified that this is going to happen and it is assumed that patients will consent to this process. We have always believed that our duty under data protection regulations is to get patients consent to share data. This has not happened and when patients are informed that there data is being shared it is currently difficult to object to this.
So ... at Kings Medical Practice nothing much is happening with the Summary Care Record, we have not shared patients data with the central database, locally there is not a critical mass of shared data for it to be used by our hospital colleagues, the only feedback we have had from patients is from those that don’t want their data shared and we think that if there is change of government in May then this is one of the IT schemes that maybe axed!
Comments
Post a Comment