Dr Sarah Wollaston MP tweeted: ‘So HES [hospital episode statistics] information uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?’ Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
A prominent Tory MP on the potent well being choose committee has questioned how the whole NHS hospital patient database for England was handed in excess of to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based mostly outside the Uk.
Sarah Wollaston, who is also a loved ones medical professional and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] information uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?”
The patient data had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “complete commence-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of assortment – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”.
The information set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants explained: “Within two weeks of commencing to use the Google equipment we have been able to produce interactive maps right from HES queries in seconds.”
The revelations alarmed campaigners and privacy professionals, who queried how Google maps could have been utilized unless some area data had been supplied in the patient data files.
The concern of which organisations have acquired medical information has been at the centre of political debate in the past number of weeks, following reports that actuaries, pharmaceutical companies, government departments and private overall health companies had either attempted or obtained patient information.
Patient groups have questioned what safeguards are in area to defend privacy and have called for full disclosure of which organisations have acquired healthcare information considering that 2010.
Stephen Dorrell, Tory chairman of the wellness decide on committee, has already stated he will write to the overall health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to request that such info is launched.
Final month, NHS England announced it would delay by 6 months the rollout of its flagship care.data scheme linking GP records and hospital data, amid criticism of how it has run the public info campaign about the undertaking.
The extracted information will have a person’s NHS amount, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender. After reside, organisations this kind of as university study departments – but also insurers and drug organizations – will be capable to apply to the new Wellness and Social Care Data Centre (HSCIC) to acquire access to the care.information database.
Even so, campaigners said it would be a folly to continue with the task, which envisages firms paying to extract patient details that would be scrubbed of some personalized identifiers but not enough to make the information entirely anonymous – a procedure recognized as “pseudonymisation”.
Phil Booth of medConfidential, which campaigns on healthcare privacy, said every day another instance of “complete population degree information becoming sold emerges which had been previously denied”.
He extra: “There is no way for the public to inform that this data has left the HSCIC. The government and NHS England should now come entirely clean. Anything at all much less than complete disclosure would be a comprehensive betrayal of believe in.”
Both PA Consulting and HSCIC have but to respond.
NHS England patient information "uploaded to Google servers", Tory MP says
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