Hospital prepares to test use of “cloud” technology for sharing patient records

Patients and their home carers will share clinical information with GPs and staff in an NHS acute trust across an “information cloud” if a London research project bears fruit. Demonstrations will begin next month at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital of a system designed to seamlessly integrate acute, primary, and home care, the project’s leaders said this week.

The so called “e-health cloud” will test one approach to the government’s stated ambition for NHS patients in England to take control of their health records. It will also attract intense scrutiny over potential risks to confidentiality of data.

The project is led by Bill Buchanan, director of the Centre for Distributed Computing and Security at Edinburgh Napier University, and Derek Bell, professor of acute medicine at Imperial College London and clinical lead at Chelsea and Westminster. It is funded not by the NHS but by the government’s Technology Strategy Board, the national innovation agency.

Professor Buchanan said this week that in the current phase the system will use data from simulated patients. Authenticated users will be able to call up key clinical services, such as risk assessments or early warning scores, on mobile phones and on web pages. In a live system, access would be based on a “circle of trust” agreed with the patient and would be able to be revoked at any time, he said.

An information technology supplier, the Scottish firm Flexiant, described the system as the first large scale health deployment of “cloud” technology, which supplies computing as a solely internet based utility rather than discrete boxes of hardware and software. However, Professor Buchanan emphasised that data will be handled in a controlled environment rather than in the so called public cloud. “Everything is locked down,” he said.

A key aim of the project will be to test governance and security procedures for sharing patients’ information between secondary, primary, and community care. Professor Buchanan acknowledged that, in the current climate, “it’s a long sell.”

Meanwhile, it emerged this week that the government’s plans for launching the “information revolution” in England, including patients’ access to their records, are unlikely to emerge until later in the year. In its detailed response to the report of the NHS Future Forum, the Department of Health said that it would respond to the information revolution consultation, which closed in January (BMJ 2011;342:d2446, doi:10.1136/bmj.d2446), in the autumn—several months later than expected. Officials said that the response would form one part of an information strategy aimed at patients, staff, and the population in general.

This week’s detailed response also acknowledges that the government needs to make more effort to reassure patients that their confidential information will be protected.