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Neil Williams wrote: > > it will make drug treatment safer > because I can check that a patient is having regular blood tests for a > particular side-effect or drug related biological state without needing > to pester a GP. Precisely what the risk assessment said. More information, better treatment, less privacy. It is an almost inevitable trade-off. To be honest, if you aren't famous/infamous, probably no one will ever care to check your medical record dishonestly. And I doubt there is much scope for blackmail. Sure there is some sensitive stuff in medical records but you probably need to collate information from a number of sources to put it together to blackmail a stranger. Sure more information might leak out about peoples friends and family, but a lot of that sort of information probably gets out anyway, it probably won't be a sea change. > Another 5-10% > I cannot help simply because that patient usually gets their scripts > dispensed elsewhere and I have no records to check. I went from the Lloyds Pharmacy on Heavitree Road the the LLoyds Pharmacy at Heavitree health centre (about 150 yards as the crow flies), because the former was busy one day, and it didn't appear that my information made the journey. > The NHS is a monolith - right or wrong, that's what the politics > require. Monolithic systems require system-wide IT implementations. Monolithic systems are often most in need of small flexible IT tools, and often the least able to deploy them from the bottom up. Whilst it may be monolithic, it is far from being homogeneous, which is where having the same systems all over gives benefits. Although some of the services are very similar, I suspect the specialist units will look at any central solutions askance, where as the average pharmacy, or GP, is likely to get at least some of what they'd expect eventually, barring complete failure. > The only alternative to the NHS IT spine is to break up the NHS into > county sized independent units and create that wonder of tabloid > headlines: a true postcode lottery for all sectors of healthcare. One could envisage a lighter spine, with nothing recorded but identifying data (name, dob, NHS number), and location of records in locally held systems (URI?), more like the DNS delegation than say LDAP. Indeed local systems could provide an interface for providing such metadata, so many groups could gather different collections of such metadata depending on their needs. But I suspect it was deemed more efficient to extract essential information centrally (allergies, prescriptions). Of course it probably is more efficient in an abstract or theoretical way, but I suspect changes and modification of such databases will needs something pretty flexible at the centre anyway to avoid being stuck with version 1.0 forever because not everyone can upgrade at once.
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