The E-Health Insider reports on a new fund for NHS Innovation
Health minister Lord Darzi has unveiled a package of measures to encourage and spread innovation in the NHS.
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The Department of Health is creating a £20m prize fund to encourage people working inside and outside the NHS to combat “the key health issues facing the nation.â€
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It is also creating a £220m fund to distribute money to strategic health authorities to encourage the spread of innovation over the next five years.
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DH information says: “The funds will focus largely on promoting innovation in healthcare delivery, health improvement and patient engagement rather than the development of new medicines or devices, for which funds are already available.â€
While this is very unlikely to result in amazing innovations, there is hope for ‘open standards, open data’ reforms for the NHS. Referring to “Information Technology” and the NHS in the same sentence is a poor joke for UK taxpayers. Projects have uniformly been failures – partially due to lack of experience of massive scale deployments of technology and a dependence on certain proprietary technologies which have scalability issues. Part of the reasons for the failings seem to be the precious need for security of our medical data.
One of the things bothering me about the “security” of NHS data is that it always seems stored in one central location (which is then burned to DVD and left in a taxi somewhere). Pardon me but I’d like to keep my own medical records on a USB dongle on my set of keys so that if something happens to me, it’s easily viewable. It would be an easy and cheap way of storing records. Add a bit of digital rights management (rather than trying to lock away our MP3s) and you’ve got a solution that will please most of the people most of the time. If I lose it, it’s just my records not mine and those of a thousand others. And this solution is used in other countries in Europe. Why are we so scared of it?
This solution isn’t innovative, it’s just sense. It’s not going to need hundreds of millions to implement.
Having your own medical records on you, either on a USB key, on your phone, on your credit card chip (even if it’s just a key to access your data on a server somewhere) makes sense. How about storing it on an Identity card. Oh, wait…
I suspect any scheme like this will run into the same privacy bollocks we hear about ID cards now.
Again – we have all this DRM crap thrown at us. Why not use it for the benefit of the consumer rather than just big media.
It won’t happen, not because it isn’t a good idea, it is, but rather that knowledge is power and no-one in the healthcare industry wants to make data readily available to anyone else, regardless if it is your data or not.
You aren’t legally entitled to full disclosure of your own medical records. There can be withheld information. So I don’t see everyone getting an ID-usb-stick.
However, there is no need for centralised data storage – it is itself a huge risk. De-centralised storage is the answer, replicate the data everywhere, then there is backup in place.
With the pace we are developing ‘data’ we need to be exponentially creating places to store it.
Why am I not entitled to disclosure of my own medical records. That seems fundamentally wrong as the Data Protection Act permits me to see my own data in pretty much every other circumstance.
The Data Protection Act 1998, gives every living person or their authorised representative, the right to apply for access to their health records irrespective of when they were compiled.
A health record can be recorded in a computerised form or in a manual form or even a mixture of both. They may include such things as, hand-written clinical notes, letters to and from other health professionals, laboratory reports, radiographs and other imaging records e.g. X-rays and not just X-ray reports, printouts from monitoring equipment, photographs, videos and tape-recordings of telephone conversations.
Two Reasons why access could be denied
1. Where the information released may cause serious harm to the physical or
mental health or condition of the patient, or any other person.
2. Or where access would disclose information relating to or provided by a third
person, this would not be a health professional who had not consented to that
disclosure.
Under the Data Protection Act 1998, these are the only two reasons
where access could be denied or limited to a patient or their authorised
representative.
Yup, as I said full disclosure is not guaranteed.
Make a freedom of information request and see how quick your data is reclassified, sanitised and obsfucated.
Most wards use specific abbreviations and slang in your notes too. There’s a four letter one for time wasting hypochandriacs in most a&e depts.