The reaction of a lot of people to this report about a Big Brother “health” database is that it’s nothing to worry about as it’s not happening here:
GPs are to be forced to hand over confidential records on all their patients’ drinking habits, waist sizes and illnesses.
The files will be stored in a giant information bank that privacy campaigners say represents the ‘biggest data grab in NHS history’.
They warned the move would end patient confidentiality and hand personal information to third parties.
The data includes weight, cholesterol levels, body mass index, pulse rate, family health history, alcohol consumption and smoking status.
Diagnosis of everything from cancer to heart disease to mental illness would be covered. Family doctors will have to pass on dates of birth, postcodes and NHS numbers.
Officials insisted the personal information would be made anonymous and deleted after analysis.
But Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said: ‘Under these proposals, medical confidentiality is, in effect, dead and there is currently nobody standing in the way.’ Nick Pickles, of the privacy group Big Brother Watch, said NHS managers would now be in charge of our most confidential information.
He added: ‘It is unbelievable how little the public is being told about what is going on, while GPs are being strong-armed into handing over details about their patients and to not make a fuss.
‘Not only have the public not been told what is going on, none of us has been asked to give our permission for this to happen.’
The data grab is part of Everyone Counts, a programme to extend the availability of patient data across the Health Service.
What the hell do people think the Obamacare Electronic Health Record (EHR) is all about?
Anyone who thinks they don’t want to do the same thing here and that the mechanism isn’t already in place has not been paying attention.
Doctors who cooperate are violating their patients’ confidentiality, and I’m sure many of them will refuse. But that will only weed the good ones out.
Comments
5 responses to “What’s in store for us?”
I avoid doctors like the plague.
Those who have to see doctors will be increasingly forced lie in order to protect their privacy.
(Lying to a health care provider will probably become another federal crime.)
Some people are so hypersensitive to privacy when doing business one would be at a loss to gather their surnames. Even a friend’s disapproval elicits screams of privacy bloodily murdered.
The government’s annual demand for personal financial information, soon to be augmented by our medical records, furrows not a brow.
Eric,
“Lying to a health care provider will probably become another federal crime.”
I’m afraid you are right. I wonder if we’ll be able to “plead the 5th”. Probably not, the Bill of Rights will likely be gone along with the rest of the US Constitution.
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