Late last year I wrote a report for the National Audit Office on the health IT expenditure, strategies and goals of the UK and a number of other developed countries. This showed that our National Program for IT is in many ways an outlier, and high-risk. Now that the NAO has published its own report, we’re allowed to make public our contribution to it.
Readers may recall that I was one of 23 computing professors who wrote to Parliament’s Health Select Committee asking for a technical review of this NHS computing project, which seems set to become the biggest computer project disaster ever. My concernes were informed by the NAO work.
After having worked on the NHS program for x years, I asked for my health record data not to be shared. Externality and risk trade-offs within the security department were far too frequent, and the security consequences that great I had to resign on ethical grounds, especially as when I made a complaint I was told to cut corners! and then was bullied out of my job. Now that’s great security steerage! From the executive!, if not honest naivety on my part!
See FIPR for 29 June 2005; there’s an opt-out letter we’ve drafted and which a number of people have sent to the health secretary (and her predecessor). See for example Ian Brown’s blog.