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Man Charged £2,000 For Medical Records Stored On Obsolete System
An anonymous reader writes "In Britain, where it is custom and practice to charge around £10 for a copy of your medical results, a patient has discovered that his copy will cost him £2,000 because the records are stored on an obsolete system that the current IT systems cannot access. Can this be good for patient care if no-one can access records dating back from a previous filing system? Perhaps we need to require all current systems to store data in a way that is vendor independent, and DRM-free, too?"
That'll fix all the issues. London has fog, too, so the clouds are even easier to access.
Who the hell decided to not do the format conversion when they phased out the old system?
That's more than the statutory maximums in both the Access to Health Records Act 1990 and Data Protection Act 1998 (as amended), which is £50 (if the records are a combination of computer and paper) or £10 (computer only).
This is not legal advice, but it is a recommendation that he should seek legal advice.
So 1 person has some trouble getting some old files vs our current system where we let folks with cancer die.
Yeah, what a terrible tradeoff.
They may have asked him for £2,000 but he won't have to pay it:
From the UK Information Commissioner's Office:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/personal_information.aspx
You have the right to get a copy of the information that is held about you. This is known as a subject access request...Organisations may charge a fee of up to £10 (£2 if it is a request to a credit reference agency for information about your financial standing only).There are special rules that apply to fees for paper based health records (the maximum fee is currently £50) and education records (a sliding scale from £1 to £50 depending on the number of pages provided).