British NHS Patient Records Go To the Cloud 73
smitty777 writes "The Telegraph is reporting on an effort by the NHS to put a London hospital's patient records in the cloud. One of the more interesting aspects of this is the suggestion that patients would have control over who has access to their medical data. Many have understandable security concerns, which are even more relevant considering the recent issues with Dropbox cloud storage."
It's only a matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
"in the cloud" (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with simply saying "online"? They're putting the patient records online. Medical staff will be able to access them through the internet.
Alright, now I'll hit the submit button and send this text to the cloud!
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Clinical software providers have been pushing this style of system for months now, it's hardly a "cutting edge pilot scheme"; EMIS & SystmOne are probably the furthest ahead with a lot of GP practices already using their hosted solutions for their patient records (in the case of EMIS with a caching server locally in case their link goes down).
Doctors get R/W access over N3 (The NHS "private" network, similar to JANET) and doctors & patients can get read access over the internet if they want to.
It's not "in the cloud" or "let's upload all our patient records to Rapidshare", it's a fucking hosted software solution, running out of a datacentre (in Leeds, in EMIS' case) on some servers, just like any other.