Health experts support NHS electronic records

Medical research would benefit from access to large-scale patient data

The benefits of NHS electronic patient records (EPRs) will outweigh potential privacy concerns, health experts told MPs last week.

The first pilot of the EPR system at the heart of the £12bn National Programme for NHS IT started last month, amid criticism from GPs and privacy campaigners that patients might be unwilling to share information.

But Carol Dezateux, director of the Medical Research Council’s Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health, told a Home Affairs Committee inquiry into the surveillance society that availability of such information promises significant improvements in healthcare.

‘EPRs will provide a huge advance to medical research by providing access to the kind of large-scale data that we need to do good studies. It allows us to get swift answers, look at demographic change, and link diseases inter-generationally,’ she said.

The link between smoking and lung cancer is an example of a medical breakthrough that was the result of examining large amounts of patient information.

Shami Chakrabati, director of privacy campaigner Liberty, told the committee it is crucial that legal guidelines are put in place to reassure patients.

‘If you get to a point where the public no longer trusted the protection of the confidential information they share with their doctor, then people would say less to their doctors,’ she said.

Medical research usually requires consent from patients, but with some large studies it is often too expensive to gain consent from all those involved, says Simon Wessely, professor of epidemiological and liaison psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry.

‘Most research goes ahead with consent, but there are times when that is not possible,’ he said.