Stuart Sumner reports:
A letter from NHS England to EMIS Health, a firm that supplies software to GP surgeries, reveals plans to extract data around millions of patients’ GP appointments within the next couple of months.
Whilst some media outlets have claimed that the data will include personally identifiable information – which has provoked an outcry among privacy campaigners since neither GPs nor their patients have been consulted over the plans – NHS England has rebutted the criticism, claiming that only top level information will be involved.
Oh, it’s the “it’s just metadata” argument again?
Read more on Computing.co.uk. Phil Booth appropriately calls bullshit on NHS’s reassurance:
If NHS England thinks a complete list of when and how often you visit the doctor, and who it is that you see, isn’t personal information then maybe someone involved should have gone to medical school, rather than politics school.