Legal Research

England Changes Patient Consent Policy for Electronic Health Records

One of my previous blogs discussed some of the security issues with the National Health Service’s Connecting for Health IT Programme. A recent article in the Financial Times reports that the NHS has changed the way that patients can consent to having their Electronic Health Record (EHR) posted online. The plan is to upload a summary patient record which would be available to any of the patient’s treating clinicians nationwide now and in the future.  There would also be a detailed record available locally to the patient’s regular physician.   Originally the plan called for the physician to presume that his patient would consent to have his medical information posted in the database or he (the patient) would opt-out. The new change in the patient consent process – the patient will be asked for his consent before the first summary report is created and he will be given the opportunity to opt-out if he wishes. During each future medical visit, the patient will be asked if his current clinician can look at his electronic record; he can agree, opt-out entirely at this point, or refuse for this current medical visit only.  He will also be asked to consent to the record being permanently available to other accredited clinicians who may treat him in the future.

Hopefully, this will move the programme along by helping to boost patient confidence in the security of their EHR which will also increase physician support for the programme.   

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 08, 2008 (boomark / email).