[Gllug] NHS opt out

[Christian Smith]

- Tethys uttered:

> On 1/22/07, Mike Brodbelt <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Even if they put you down on the database as an alcoholic, and then tell
>> lots of people about it without notifying you, including distributing it
>> to private companies. Oh, and you can't get the entry corrected without
>> withdrawing entirely from the NHS. Good that...
>> 
>> http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1937302,00.html
>
> The most worrying bit about that is where the article states:
>
> "An unknown official at a hospital was updating her medical records
> and inputted a wrong code."
>
> Unknown? WTF? How many millions of taxpayers money have we given to
> EDS / Accenture / whoever, and yet they've been unable to implement a
> simple audit trail of who added a given note to a patient's record?
> Why was such an audit trail not a mandatory part of the spec, and why
> was the system ever signed off to go live without it?


To be fair, the mistake was entered in 1988, and the computer system was 
unlikely to have been implemented by EDS at the time. The data was 
probably transferred from a legacy system as a snapshot, without autdit 
information.

Personally, I think her reaction is a bit OTT. I want my medical records 
on a central computer, so long as they are accessed for NHS medical 
reasons only, plus perhaps anonymous statistical reasons. Certainly not 
commercial reasons.

This is the crux of the problem. People complain about centralised data 
from the privacy POV, whereas what they're objecting to is the access to 
the data rather than how it is stored. Centralised data is good if 
properly managed.

What's more laughable is how many of these people have credit cards and 
bank accounts etc. Try getting a bank account and refusing to have your 
personal data on their central database. Good luck with that!


>
> It seems governmental incompetence really does know no bounds.


Just an indicator of how poorly big organisations scale, and government is 
about as big as it gets.


>
> Tet
>

Christian

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