Reading this on the ongoing farce that is the government procured NHS computer programme, it occurred to me that they really should have created a web-based suite of applications. No, really. Had they done so, they’d've immediately cut their budget from £12.7bn to maybe a tenth of that. They could have used existing PCs and networks, and ensured they were not locked in to proprietory technologies. Ok, so there’d be applications which would require more raw processing power than could be delivered by the network, but as long as the results could be broken down into manageable, readable files, then where’s the difficulty?

And accessing patient records would be a (very secure) breeze. It would work like this: everyone gets a personal website from the day they were born, where all their details are stored, and they’re the only people who can log on and see everything (once they’d reached their majority of course). There would be some things that the person can edit, like their address, personal preferences and relationships, and others that the professionals involved could edit, either with the consent of the individual, or in the case of, say a diagnosis or prescription, without it. Pages would only be viewable with the patient’s consent, and would be protected by the highest level of encryption available at that time.

Then of course all of the data would be held centrally, and be accessible to the patient anywhere in the world where there’s a PC with a browser capable of the required level of encryption. Imagine that, go to Turkey and find that if you get blood poisoning the medics there would be able to view your records and see what medication you are currently on. Big plus. You could granularise the access too: maybe we’d have publically available medical profiles for emergencies — which the patient could choose what to display.

So of course there are security issues, with huge levels of complexity about who can access what, and how access codes are securely distributed, but frankly if we wanted to future-proof the thing, well, shoving it in to a vast online database would do the trick. Maybe it wouldn’t be absolutely secure, but what government facility has ever been secure? I know that is not really an argument, but I am sure present levels of encryption would be good enough.

But then you take it further, perhaps each person should have a webpage which includes their education record, their criminal record, their income tax … everything. How would that be? A recipe for disaster or a way in which each individual can keep track of their affairs, and maybe have more control over them — imagine for example having a live readout on your credit rating by logging onto your personal webpage.

I come back to the original idea tho’ — they should have used the net, surely?

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