“Conservative proposals to encourage us to take charge of our own health records, storing them on services provided by businesses such as Google and Microsoft, make sense from the point of view of public health and, more debatably, privacy. What the scheme will not do is reduce the NHS’s need for massive and expensive IT systems.
The idea that Google could replace the NHS electronic care records service in England (and its equivalents in devolved parts of the UK) appears in a fascinating booklet published last month by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) thinktank. Rightly, it attacks Labour’s record of trying to tackle almost every conceivable social and administrative problem with massively expensive IT systems joined up through the “Transformational Government” programme.”
Article
Michael Cross, The Guardian, 6 July 2009
