Comment from Smoothwall on how the NHS must digitalise to prevent further NHS data losses
February 2017 by Zak Suleman, Healthcare Specialist, Smoothwall
There’s news this morning about the NHS losing more than 500,000 pieces of
confidential medical documents. Zak Suleman, Healthcare Specialist at
Smoothwall, reacts to this by discussing the need to
digitalise the NHS to avoid this risk in future:
"News that the NHS has lost more than 500,000 pieces of confidential medical
documents is further evidence of the NHS’s need to digitalise to ensure vital
patients’ correspondence is sent to the right people on time. Although Jeremy Hunt’s
target of a paperless health service by 2018 was ditched, a digitalised service
would have almost guaranteed that this would never have happened. The Health
Secretary took aim at the hospitals’ weak IT systems as a reason for abandoning the
2018 target, but this latest data loss shows that the problem can no longer be
ignored.
A fully paperless NHS that allows the easy exchange of data would be more efficient
and fool proof than the current set-up. However, to simply ’digitalise’ one of the
biggest institutions in the UK is a complex overhaul and the government must ensure,
above all else, that all data is kept safe and secure. If improperly secured,
hackers could steal patients’ medical information and use this to potentially
blackmail them. There’s also the issue of ’social engineering’ - threat actors could
also take information such as the address and contact details of a patient, of whom
they could build a profile and exploit fully later. Yet these threats are
preventable as long as hospitals use heightened data encryption, filtering and
firewalls. The NHS must embrace technology now or risk further debacles using
outdated solutions."