UK healthcare records might head into The Cloud if the Conservatives win the next General Election with the likes of Google and Microsoft set to benefit.
While the Labour government is currently ploughing on with the much-criticised £12.7 billion on premises NHS National Programme for IT which is behind schedule, a Tory government would encourage patients to to store their medical records with companies like Google and Microsoft according to reports from Tory sources this week.
Officially no decisions have been made, but Tory leader David Cameron said on Monday: “For every penny we could save on the computer that isn't really working very well we could put money into nurses and doctors and patient care. I don't accept the principle that the safest place for information is with the 'jolly good Government' because actually if we think about it - who has lost all our data recently? It was Revenue and Customs, the Government - I don't accept that somehow our data is safe when it is the Government that is looking after it."
Google, Microsoft set to win?
Cameron has previously proposed that the NHS should look at services like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. "We would have said, 'Today you don't need a massive central computer to do this,'" he said. "People can store their health records securely online; they can show them to whichever doctor they want. They're in control, not the state.
"When they're in control of their own health records, they're more interested in their health, so they might start living more healthily, saving the NHS money. But, best of all in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government's bureaucratic scheme services – like Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault – costs virtually nothing to run."
The Conservatives have commissioned an independent review of NHS computing services which is due to report in the next few weeks. It's thought that on the back of this, patients will be given the option of storing records with private companies – which might also include the likes of Bupa – but will not be compelled to do so.
A Tory party spokesman said the review had not yet reached even preliminary conclusions but a party source was widely quoted as saying: "This is an agenda we are massively keen on. We are thinking about how in government the architecture of technology needs to change, with people 'owning' their own data, including their health records. We are 100% certain there will not be an exclusive deal with one provider. We fully expect multiple providers that will almost certainly be free to users.”
Controversial
But any move to allow Google to take on such records work would be likely to lead to political controversy because of Cameron's previous associations with the firm. Cameron himself spoke at the Google Zeitgeist conference in 2007, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined a Conservative business forum to advise on economic policy while Steve Hilton, Cameron's policy adviser, is married to Rachel Whetstone, a senior Google communications executive.
A sign of what might be to come came when Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem health spokesman, commented: "It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth that there are repeated references to Google, given the closeness of Team Cameron to that organisation, and it leaves concerns about commercial advantage."
Whether the NHS records move to The Cloud, Cameron does plan to use online resources to take the UK into what he calls a 'post-bureaucratic age' in which information about public services would be more easily accessible by taxpayers and would enable cost savings to be passed onto frontline resources.
On the back of the Digital Britain report last month, plans were announced for a public sector Cloud – the G-Cloud – which would replace the existing on premise approach to UK government computing projects. Martin Bellamy, the head of Connecting for Health (CfH) which runs the NPfIT, is leaving his position there to become responsible for the G-Cloud.
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