News
NHS data loss - comment from Egress
February 2017 by Tony Pepper, co-founder and CEO of Egress
The NHS has been accused of covering up a large data loss, where more than
half a million pieces of confidential information have been mislaid, as
reported in The Guardian.
Tony Pepper, co-founder and CEO of Egress, comments:
"There’s going to be a lot of clearing up to do here. Not only in
determining who has been impacted by this catastrophic oversight and
exactly how far the problem extends, but it’s also going to raise new
questions about why the NHS is still relying on physical data records. Just
this month Jeremy Hunt admitted that the original target of a paperless NHS
by 2018 was unlikely to be met, but given what we know now, perhaps that
needs to be revisited again?
Physical data is inherently less secure than digital - it’s difficult to
trace, goes missing easily and is often open to interference. While digital
records have their own set of challenges, with the right foresight and
security and compliance mechanisms in place, it’s far less likely to go
missing or be subject on this scale to the same issues of human error.
We’re yet to discover the full extent of this data loss, but it’s not an
over reaction to suggest the difference between going digital or not is a
matter of life or death."
