The issues with sharing confidential patient information needs to be tackled before the NHS attempts to go paperless, according to Dr Jonathan Richardson, clinical director of informatics at the Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.
The secretary of state for health, Jeremy Hunt, wants the NHS to be paperless by 2018 in order to save money and streamline services.
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However, the idea of information governance is yet to be tackled, although Hunt is to respond to an independent review that has looked to clarify the position for citizens' rights to object to their personal data being shared in the next week.
At the Westminster Health Forum today, when asked how a doctor should deal with the dilemma of sharing confidential patient information, even if it was to the benefit of the patient in question, Dr Richardson said that it was still an area that needed to be tackled.
"If you can't get it right on paper, you won't get it right on an electronic system, so you need to work it out before it goes on to an electronic system," he said.
The chair of the independent review, Dame Fiona Caldicott, told delegates that the independent review would build on the work of the NHS Future Forum and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in order to find out what patients concerns were of data sharing in the NHS.
"There are increasing concerns about the security of information and many of the public worry about breaches of confidentiality. The Future Forum found that people had to tell one hospital about their history time and time again, and people do not appreciate giving out information more than once. One thing we need to do is be more informative on our current limitations and to tell people how we are trying to improve things," said Caldicott.
She said that some professionals have been pre-occupied with the security of information and had lost their professional judgement on when information should be shared, thereby not putting the patient first.
"It is not about the technology, it is about the patient that comes for care and how they are treated," she exclaimed.
The feedback that the independent review has from citizens is that they strongly support the idea of more sharing of information to support their care, particularly anonymised data that could be used "for the public good".
However, while people are keen for the NHS to use this data to help with any research, they want to be asked before this information is used and strongly oppose identifiable data being used for other purposes than those that they have been informed about.
Fiona also stated that organisations currently have a fear or anxiety about data sharing, with fines from the Information Commissioner's Office for data breaches becoming more common and their reputation at stake.
She called for a simplification of information governance and said that she hopes the independent report we will enhance trust in the system.
