By Tony Collins
A headline in the Telegraph yesterday read
Hospital records of all NHS patients sold to insurers
The article said the medical records of every NHS hospital patient in the country have been sold for insurance purposes.
Those in charge of the programme have said it would be illegal for information extracted from GP files to be sold to insurers, who might seek to target customers or put up their prices.
“However, a report by a major UK insurance society discloses that it was able to obtain 13 years of hospital data – covering 47 million patients – in order to help companies “refine” their premiums.
“As a result they recommended an increase in the costs of policies for thousands of customers last year. The report by the Staple Inn Actuarial Society – a major organisation for UK insurers – details how it was able to use NHS data covering all hospital in-patient stays between 1997 and 2010 to track the medical histories of patients, identified by date of birth and postcode.”
The NHS Hospital Episode Statistics were said to be a “valuable data source in developing pricing assumptions for ‘critical illness’ cover”.
Comment
The Department of Health has always denied that the identities of patients could be obtained from anonymised or pseudonymised statistical data, although the disclosure to some commercial and research organisations of dates of birth and postcodes, even without names of patients, has always made it theoretically possible to identify individuals, especially those with unusual illnesses.
Now the Health and Social Information Centre in its comments to The Guardian seems to hint that it might have been possible in the past to identify individuals.
Sharing “anonymous” NHS statistics with NHS researchers is one thing. Sharing it with insurance companies is quite another. Albeit with a 6-month delay, the Health and Social Care Information Centre is going ahead with plans for a database of GP-held patent data (as opposed to hospital data which has long been held on a SUS database by BT).
The HSCIC is staffed by some of those from predecessor agencies. Can its staff be trusted with patient data?
Thank you to campaigner Dave Orr for his email to me on the Telegraph article.
Hospital records of 47m patients obtained by insurance society – Guardian
Campaign4Change 
What do you expect?
As in there seemed to be no clear thought behind the original NPfIT program in respect of what was to be collected, how and why and what secondary use it could then be put to.
I could go on and on and on but I wont, what I will do instead is show what secondary use can look like when a national program is put in place with a set of clearly defined and achievable goals and without spending anywhere near 10+Billion.
http://www.cihi.ca
If the chief architect allows me I will add his email to this post for those interested in getting in touch.
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