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The government is to introduce a digital data bill, designed to standardise information across the NHS and make it easier to share electronic records
“It allows us to introduce patient passports, so whether you’re seeing a GP or a hospital surgeon, they have your full medical history. We will be able to judge a child’s risk of disease from birth, so they can take steps to prevent it striking.” Wes Streeting, health and social care secretary
Health secretary Wes Streeting has announced plans to introduce portable medical records, which will mean that every NHS patient will have their medical information stored in a single place.
The digital data bill, to be introduced this week, will standardise information systems across the NHS, making it possible to share electronic records across all NHS trusts in England. This will speed up patient care, reduce repeat medical tests and minimise medication errors, Streeting said. All a patient’s health information, including test results and letters, will be brought together in a single patient record on the NHS app. These portable medical records, known as patient passports, will contain health data that can be accessed quickly and easily by GPs, hospitals and ambulance services.
Streeting said the bill “will enable us to better share patient records across the NHS that could save around 1.5 million hours a year, just through better data management”. The bill will also make it easier for researchers to get access to patient records, with ministers insisting privacy concerns must not be allowed to stop data-sharing to improve care. He has also said that some responsibility for GP records will be taken by NHS England to ensure they can be used for research. He has not ruled out the possibility of allowing central control of all GP data if doctors are reluctant to share it.
Writing in the Guardian, Streeting noted the advantages inherent in the fact that health care in the UK is provided by a single organisation, arguing that the NHS is the “best-placed healthcare system in the world to take advantage of rapid advances in data, genomics, predictive and preventative medicine.”
He added: “It allows us to introduce patient passports, so whether you’re seeing a GP or a hospital surgeon, they have your full medical history. We will be able to judge a child’s risk of disease from birth, so they can take steps to prevent it striking.”
Some people have expressed concerns about privacy, however, including medConfidential, a patient privacy campaign group, which said that the plans would unavoidably create a vulnerable database, the contents of which could then be shared with drug companies. Records could potentially be viewed by any of the NHS’s 1.5 million staff, they argued, even if they are not treating the patient.
The health secretary told the Guardian, however, that the new patient records would be “protected and anonymised.”
Streeting has also launched a large-scale public consultation on the government’s plans to transform the NHS from an analogue service to a digital one over the next decade. Launching a “national conversation” with the public, health workers and experts to help shape the government’s 10-year NHS plan, to be published in spring next year, Streeting said that as well as the digitisation of the NHS, he wanted healthcare to shift from hospitals to the community, telling Times Radio: “I would like to see more diagnostics taking place, more tests and scans taking place, in local neighbourhoods rather than in hospitals. I’d like to see things like minor injuries taken care of in services closer to people’s homes [rather] than people having to travel to A&E.”
He defended the government’s plan to transform healthcare in England by working with big tech and pharmaceutical companies to develop new treatments, saying he would get the “best possible deal” for the NHS. He said that the development “will mean the NHS can work hand in hand with the life sciences sector, offering access to our large and diverse set of data”.
FCC Insight
In the past few years, the NHS has made a lot of progress towards digitisation, making patient information accessible to both patients and clinicians. Unfortunately, progress has been hampered by the use of multiple different record systems, meaning that sometimes hospital data cannot be accessed by GPs, and vice versa.
The new digital data bill, which will put all the patient’s information in a single record, is a welcome move, and will undoubtedly improve both NHS efficiency and safety. Paramedics called to an emergency, for example, will be able to see a patient’s medical history at a glance, while GPs will no longer need to spend hours chasing up test results from the hospital.
We also welcome the decision to make NHS data available to researchers to improve our understanding of illness and to improve care. Concerns about privacy are legitimate, however, and we look forward to having more detail from the government about how it plans to protect patient confidentiality.
We wholeheartedly endorse this move as we do with the similar Tony Blair Institute’s call for a digital health record (DHR) for every citizen. The portable medical record would need to give patients more control over their own health information and support the move towards a more integrated model of care. Enabling the records to support a much greater degree of data-driven decision-making could lead to improvements in patient care as well as great efficiencies across the health service. The ability to harness data at a national level and use it to train artificial intelligence (AI) models could be genuinely transformative.
A report from the consultant Ernst & Young argued that the patient records held by the NHS could have an indicative market value of £5bn a year to a commercial organisation. The opportunities for the NHS to derive value from a centralised database or the ability to bring all the data together, provided proper privacy controls are put in place, are substantial.