A DT scandal

The DT published a scandal yesterday according to which the evil government, having promised us it would do no such thing, has sold our precious and private medical records to the insurance industry for them better to extract money out of us. It further claimed that it was possible, despite the records sold having been anonymised, to link them to credit records, making the ensemble much richer than it would otherwise be. On the face of it all very scandalous.

But further thought suggested that the records in question were probably from what I used to know as the hospital in patient enquiry (HIPE), a long standing statistical survey of all in-patient episodes and you can read all about it at http://www.hscic.gov.uk/hesdata, where I read that what I used to know as HIPE has been enlarged to something called hospital episode statistics (HES), from which a lot of stuff is published and even more of which is available on request. There are quite a lot of rules and guidelines about such requests, although I have not looked carefully enough to see whether the various episodes for one individual are or could be linked together, something which would clearly be of value to a medical researcher.

I learn in passing that the Irish government see fit to operate a survey with the same name, presumably along the same lines and I can only suppose they are being evil too.

So the the DT has conflated your medical record with a statistical summary of your stays in hospital, should you have had any. On the other hand, it does seem quite likely that someone in government has given the insurers individual episode records without names but with postcodes, which quite possibly could be, have been even, matched with other data sources. The Census of Population used to have rules about not releasing data at postcode level from which, for whatever reason, one could extract data about individuals. Perhaps the medical people have been less scrupulous.

At the very least, I think there has been carelessness somewhere in the public relations part of the national health world: given how excited people get about privacy, it was careless to be dishing out firm assurances about the safety and privacy of your data in the giant computer systems being put together, while omitting to mention the sale of this other data to the insurance industry. Perhaps all part of why there is now a pause.

I should also say that I am all in favour of giant computer systems. I think it is a jolly good idea that if I get taken ill in the wilds of Cornwall, the doctors there (if any) can get hold of my medical records from Epsom. Also a good thing that such data should be made available for medical research. The trick being to make sure that such data is not abused along the way, that my data does not wind up sculling about some landfill site because someone has been careless. (Someone once told me (in the pub) that he found his own electricity bill sculling about somewhere near the seaside. He was very angry about it and although it was rather a long shot, I did believe him, while being more amused than angry).