My worry about the recent news that the new e-records system is plagued with bugs, is that one of these glitches will compromise sensitive clinical information. I don’t think that clinicians and patients should be the beta-testing environment for an embryonic IT system such as this. One slip up and there will be disastrous consequences for patient confidentiality.
Last week at our practice, we wanted to check that any patient who had opted-out of the spine would, in fact not have any data uploaded. After initial emails to the PCT and the clinical software guru dealing with “spine-related” questions, it wasn’t clear and there was conflicting information given to us. We felt that on an issue as vitally important as this, there was no room for confusion, so we expressed our dissatisfaction to this response. It finally transpired that it was not possible to opt-out of having demographic data on the spine, only clinical information. Patients’ names and addresses needed to be on the system to allow referrals to be made and software, such as choose and book, to work. So what actually checks that no further information is taken, as there is clearly some kind of link between the spine and my clinical system? Will the spine check for the opt-out Read code thoroughly enough?
It seems to me that someone needs to ensure that no patient information is inadvertently sucked up the pipe to the spine. This needs to be tested and retested prior to the big red “turn-on” button being pressed by someone in the IT office of the DH. I am not happy that a system currently full of bugs and access problems is released for testing in my practice on my patients.