The NHS is selling off your medical records see here for how much they are charging for it! From April it will include GP data. We discovered this in 2008 when we got the story on the front page of Sunday Telegraph see here so all political parties seem to have this plan. It has been sold since 2008 but on a smaller scale as the NHS did not have the IT infrastructure in place to support it on a larger scale. The GP side did not have the IT infrastructure until this year although it has been planned for at least 4 years.

We have heard directly from the ISOFT Syngery supplier and yes Syngery does have an audit trail to show who has looked at your computer records but it appears Emis and INPS do not.

There are plans to include non GP information in the Summary Care Record which means hospital records could be included too.

The story is here

GP data is to be linked via new database/extraction service called the GPES (General Practice Extraction Service) to the hospital (SUS) Secondary User Service database and made public under the governments open standards initiative.

We are currently looking at GPES and you will be able to out of GPES. This begs the question why can patients not opt out of SUS if they can GPES?

You can read more about GP data being opened up here.

Patient data sharing may, very worrying, not take into account anonymisation concerns as no anonymisation can be 100% accurate. Pseudoanonymisingdata means that your date of birth and postcode will be shared without your consent so you could easily be traced. This how the government is proposing to anonymise our data by pseudoanonymising patient medical records. The full story is here