Now that’s a security breach: England’s entire healthcare data set uploaded to Google servers

2014

Who needs a national spy service to track your citizens when you’ve got a national health service?

HealthCare.gov hasn’t been around long enough to replace the NSA, but that’s not the case in Britain with the respective agencies there.

The National Health Service’s plan to share de-identified data with pharma companies was bad and unpopular to begin with.

The UK government’s Health and Social Care Information Centre quietly announced plans to share all patient records held by the National Health Service with private companies, from insurers to pharmaceutical companies. The information sharing is on an opt-out basis, so if you don’t want your “clinical records, mental health consultations, drug addiction rehabilitation details, sexual health clinic attendance and abortion procedures” shared, along with your “GP records, HS numbers, post-codes, gender, date of birth,” you need to contact your doctor and opt out of the process.

Just a few weeks ago, the NHS decided to delay the program for six months:

…privacy experts have warned there will be no way for the public to work out who has their medical records, or to what use their data will be put. There have been questions raised about commercial companies buying data.

Last week, the British government admitted to releasing the data to insurance companies:

… the Health and Social Care Information Centre admitted giving the insurance industry the coded hospital records of millions of patients, pseudonymised, but re-identifiable by anyone with malicious intent. These were crunched by actuaries into tables showing the likelihood of death depending on various features such as age or disease, to help inform insurance premiums.

via Now that's a security breach: England's entire healthcare data set uploaded to Google servers.

Cool eh? Not to panic, we are talking the UK here, not the U.S. I guess government screw ups aren’t limited by borders. On the other hand, if you want good premiums, somebody has to have good data. Insurers in the new marketplace plans are pretty much flying blind at this point and will still be doing so when they are required to submit 2015 premiums.