Your medical record should belong to you
3 min read
When did you last write a letter and put a stamp on an envelope? When did you last visit a bank? Do you have any coins in your pocket and, if not, do you even use a credit card anymore?
Many of us can’t remember the answer to these questions. Life is becoming more and more digital. It’s true in healthcare – many people now communicate with their GP by text or email, and we are all increasingly running our lives on our mobile phones.
Let’s put our medical records online and let everyone access them easily. Currently, depending on where you live, you might be able to access some GP letters, lists of vaccinations and blood test results on the NHS app. However this system is patchy and incomplete. A solution to our overcomplicated and frustrating medical data system is switching the ownership of the medical record.
When I was working as an NHS consultant, IT was a constant difficulty
At present, patient records are not the patient’s property. Medical data instead belongs to the healthcare organisations and can only be accessed by patients on request. Switching this around will allow everyone to access their own record. It will be key to creating the ‘patient passports’ that eight in 10 people across the UK support, giving patients great agency over their health.
This passport would be a single patient record, with every piece of medical information about a person. It would be available to the doctor, pharmacy, hospital or social care provider when needed with permission of the patient. It would change everyone’s relationship with healthcare, letting patients access their entire clinical story and share it with their healthcare provider. Maybe, if we all knew more about our health, we might look after it a bit better.
That’s the analogue-to-digital transformation we so badly need. When I was working as an NHS consultant, IT was a constant difficulty. Computer programmes were regularly incompatible with each other or wouldn’t work at all, passwords had long-since expired and hardware took too long to boot up. I would regularly spend half the consultation time struggling with a computer instead of listening to a patient.
Now, there are great hopes that AI assistance with documenting consultations, suggesting tests and diagnosis will also help to ease the workload of doctors. Let’s also connect the health and social care systems, linking up the patient passport with education data using the unique identifier every child is given when they’re born. What a transformation that would be!
Data must be secured, and there will have to be measures in place to ensure that sensitive information such as a cancer diagnosis is explained by the clinician before it appears on the patient accessible record. But putting medical records in the hands of the patient will transform the health of our population. It will put the individual patient at the centre of things, able to survey their own care, and it will lighten the enormous administrative burden on healthcare workers, enabling them to get on with the task of caring for people.
Peter Prinsley, Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket
