NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says
Source: The Guardian
A prominent Tory MP on the powerful health select committee has questioned how the entire NHS hospital patient database for England was handed over to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based outside the UK.
... The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the "entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E".
The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: "Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds." The revelations alarmed campaigners and privacy experts, who queried how Google maps could have been used unless some location data had been provided in the patient information files.
The issue of which organisations have acquired medical records has been at the centre of political debate in the past few weeks, following reports that actuaries, pharmaceutical firms, government departments and private health providers had either attempted or obtained patient data.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/03/nhs-england-patient-data-google-servers
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